Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/204

 Had so conclusively made plain to him The permanent profusion of a world Where everybody might have everything To do, and almost everything to eat, That he was jubilantly satisfied And all unthwarted by adversity. Young George knew things. The world, he had found out, Was a good place, and life was a good game Particularly when Aunt Imogen Was in it. And one day it came to pass One rainy day when she was holding him And rocking him that he, in his own right, Took it upon himself to tell her so; And something in his way of telling it The language, or the tone, or something else- Gripped like insidious-fingers on her throat, And then went foraging as if to make A plaything of her heart. Such undeserved And unsophisticated confidence Went mercilessly home; and had she sat Before a looking-glass, the deeps of it Could not have shown more clearly to her then Than one thought-mirrored little glimpse had shown, The pang that wrenched her face and filled her eyes With anguish and intolerable mist. The blow that she had vaguely thrust aside Like fright so many times had found her now : Clean-thrust and final it had come to her From a child's lips at last, as it had come Never before, and as it might be felt Never again. Some grief, like some delight, Stings hard but once : to custom after that The rapture or the pain submits itself, And we are wiser than we were before. And Imogen was wiser; though at first