Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/223

 No vampire thoughts to suck the coward blood, The life, the very soul of her. Yes, Yes, They might come back. . . . But why should they come back ? Why was it she had suffered? Why had she Struggled and grown these years to demonstrate That close without those hovering clouds of gloom And through them here and there forever gleamed The Light itself, the life, the love, the glory, Which was of its own radiance good proof That all the rest was darkness and blind sight? And who was she? The woman she had known The woman she had petted and called "I" The woman she had pitied, and at last Commiserated for the most abject And persecuted of all womankind, Could it be she that had sought out the way To measure and thereby to quench in her The woman's fear the fear of her not fearing? A nervous little laugh that lost itself, Like logic in a dream, fluttered her thoughts An instant there that ever she should ask What she might then have told so easily So easily that Annandale had frowned, Had he been given wholly to be told The truth of what had never been before So passionately, so inevitably Confessed. For she could see from where she sat The sheets that he had bound up like a book And covered with red leather; and her eyes Could see between the pages of the book, Though her eyes, like them, were closed. And she could read