Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/82

 And all he prized alive may rule a state No larger than a grave that holds a clown; He may have been a master of his fate, And of his atoms, ready as another In his emergence to exonerate His father and his mother; He may have been a captain of a host, Self-eloquent and ripe for prodigies, Doomed here to swell by dangerous degrees, And then give up the ghost. Nahum's great grasshoppers were such as these, Sun-scattered and soon lost. Whatever the dark road he may have taken. This man^who stood on high And faced alone the sky, Whatever drove or lured or guided him, A vision answering a faith unshaken, An easy trust assumed of easy trials, A sick negation born of weak denials, A crazed abhorrence of an old condition, A blind attendance on a brief ambition, Whatever stayed him or derided him, His way was even as ours; And we, with all our wounds and all our powers, Must each await alone at his own height Another darkness or another light; And there, of our poor self dominion reft, If inference and reason shun Hell, Heaven, and Oblivion, May thwarted will (perforce precarious, But for our conservation better thus) Have no misgiving left Of doing yet what here we leave undone? Or if unto the last of these we cleave,