Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/169

 When warmed with old illusions and regrets, I mark the selfishest, and on like lines The shrewdest. For your sadness makes you climb With dragging footsteps, and it makes you groan; It hinders you when most you would be free, And there are many days it wearies you Beyond the toil itself. And if the load It lays on you may not be shaken off Till you have known what now you do not know Meanwhile you climb; and he climbs best who sees Above him truth burn faithfulest, and feels Within him truth burn purest. Climb or fall, One road remains and one firm guidance always; One way that shall be taken, climb or fall. "But 'falling, falling, falling.' There's your song, The cradle-song that sings you to the grave. What is it your bewildered poet says?— "'The toiling ocean thunders of unrest  And aching desolation; the still sea Paints but an outward calm that mocks itself To the final and irrefragable sleep That owns no shifting fury; and the shoals Of ages are but records of regret Where Time, the sun's arch-phantom, writes on sand The prelude of his ancient nothingness.'  "'T is easy to compound a dirge like that, And it is easy to be deceived And alienated by the fleshless note Of half- world yearning in it; but the truth To which we all are tending,—charlatans And architects alike, artificers In tinsel as in gold, evangelists