Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/225

 And she could stand upright, and she could see The way to take, with eyes that had in them No gleam but of the spirit. Day or night, No matter; she could see what was to see All that had been till now shut out from her, The service, the fulfillment, and the truth, And thus the cruel wiseness of it all. So Damaris, more like than anything To one long prisoned in a twilight cave With hovering bats for all companionship, And after time set free to fight the sun, Laughed out, so glad she was to recognize The test of what had been, through all her folly, The courage of her conscience; for she knew, Now on a late-flushed autumn afternoon That else had been too bodeful of dead things To be endured with aught but the same old Inert, self-contradicted martyrdom Which she had known so long, that she could look Right forward through the years, nor any more Shrink with a cringing prescience to behold The glitter of dead summer on the grass, Or the brown-glimmered crimson of still trees Across the intervale where flashed along, Black-silvered, the cold river. She had found, As if by some transcendent freakishness Of reason, the glad life that she had sought Where naught but obvious clouds could ever be Clouds to put out the sunlight from her eyes, And to put out the love light from her soul. But they were gone now they were all gone; And with a whimsied pathos, like the mist Of grief that clings to new-found happiness Hard wrought, she might have pity for the small