Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/275

 tortured King seeing Merlin wholly meshed In his defection, even to indifference, And all the while attended and exalted By some unfathomable obscurity Of divination, where the Grail, unseen, Broke yet the darkness where a king saw nothing Feared now the lady Vivian more than Fate; For now he knew that Modred, Lancelot, The Queen, the King, the Kingdom, and the World, Were less to Merlin, who had made him King, Than one small woman in Broceliande. Whereas the lady Vivian, seeing Merlin Acclaimed and tempted and allured again To service in his old magnificence, Feared now King Arthur^ more than storms and robbers ; For Merlin, though he knew himself immune To no least whispered little wish of hers That might afflict his ear with ecstasy, Had yet sufficient of his old command Of all around him to invest an eye With quiet lightning, and a spoken word With easy thunder, so accomplishing A profit and a pastime for himself And for the lady Vivian, when her guile Outlived at intervals her graciousness; And this equipment of uncertainty, Which now had gone away with him to Britain With Dagonet, so plagued her memory That soon a phantom brood of goblin doubts Inhabited his absence, which had else Been empty waiting and a few brave fears, And a few more, she knew, that were not brave, Or long to be disowned, or manageable.