Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/172

Rh And even in such currents of the mind As have no tide-rush in them, but are drowsed, Crude thoughts may dart in armor and upspring With waking sound, when all is dim with peace, Like sturgeons in the twilight out of Lethe ; And though they be discordant, hard, grotesque, And all unwelcome to the lethargy That you think means repose, you know as well As if your names were shouted when they leap, And when they leap you listen. Ah! friends, friends, There are these things we do not like to know : They trouble us, they make us hesitate, They touch us, and we try to put them off. We banish one another and then say That we are left alone : the midnight leaf That rattles where it hangs above the snow Gaunt, fluttering, forlorn scarcely may seem So cold in all its palsied loneliness As we, we frozen brothers, who have yet Profoundly and severely to find out That there is more of unpermitted love In most men's reticence than most men think. "Once, when I made it out fond-headedness To say that we should ever be apprised Of our deserts and their emolument At all but in the specious way of words, The wisdom of a warm thought woke within me And I could read the sun. Then did I turn My long-defeated face full to the world, And through the clouded warfare of it all Discern the light. Through dusk that hindered it, I found the truth, and for the first whole time Knew then that we were climbing. Not as one Who mounts along with his experience