Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/221

 Of wisdom, and of love the final thrust Unmerciful; and there where now did lie So plain before her the straight radiance Of what was her appointed way to take, Were only the bleak ruts of an old road That stretched ahead and faded and lay far Through deserts of unconscionable years. But vampire thoughts like these confessed the doubt That love denied; and once, if never again, They should be turned away. They might come back- More craftily, perchance, they might come back And with a spirit-thirst insatiable Finish the strength of her; but now, to-day She would have none of them. She knew that love Was true, that he was true, that she was true; And should a death-bed snare that she had made So long ago be stretched inexorably Through all her life, only to be unspun With her last breathing? And were bats and threads, Accursedly devised with watered gules, To be Love's heraldry? What were it worth To live and to find out that life were life But for an unrequited incubus Of outlawed shame that would not be thrown down Till she had thrown down fear and overcome The woman that was yet so much of her That she might yet go mad ? What were it worth To live, to linger, and to be condemned In her submission to a common thought That clogged itself and made of its first faith Its last impediment? What augured it, Now in this quick beginning of new life, To clutch the sunlight and be feeling back, Back with a scared fantastic fearfulness,