Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/178

 You may not feel you cannot wholly feel— How droll it was : I dreamed that I found Hamlet- Found him at work, drenched with an angry sweat, Predestined, he declared with emphasis, To root out a large weed on Lethe wharf; And after I had watched him for some time, I laughed at him and told him that no root Would ever come the while he talked like that : The power was not in him, I explained, For such compound accomplishment. He glared At me, of course, next moment laughed at me, And finally laughed with me. I was right, And we had eisel on the strength of it : 'They tell me that this water is not good,’ Said Hamlet, and you should have seen him smile. Conceited? Pelion and Ossa? pah. . . "But anon comes in a crocodile. We stepped Adroitly down upon the back of him, And away we went to an undiscovered country A fertile place, but in more ways than one So like the region we had started from, That Hamlet straightway found another weed And there began to tug. I laughed again, Till he cried out on me and on my mirth, Protesting all he knew: The Fates,' he said, 'Have ordered it that I shall have these roots.' But all at once a dreadful hunger seized him, And it was then we killed the crocodile Killed him and ate him. Washed with eisel down That luckless reptile was, to the last morsel; And there we were with flag-fens all around us, And there was Hamlet, at his task again, Ridiculous. And while I watched his work, The drollest of all changes came to pass.