Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935). Collected Poems. 1921.
I. The Man Against the Sky23. Llewellyn and the Tree
C
The paradise that he had planned,
Llewellyn would have loved his wife
As well as any in the land.
To goad him for what God left out,
Llewellyn would have been as mild
As any we have read about.
Llewellyn would have had no story;
He would have stayed a quiet man
And gone his quiet way to glory.
Priscilla was implacable;
And whatsoever timid hopes
He built—she found them, and they fell.
Of labored harmony between
Resounding discords, till at last
Llewellyn turned—as will be seen.
And shriller than the sound of saws,
Pursued Llewellyn once too far,
Not knowing quite the man he was.
The stinging garment of his wrath;
And this was all before the day
When Time tossed roses in his path.
Llewellyn had already risen.
The roses may have ruined him,
They may have kept him out of prison.
Made roses do the work of spears,—
Though many made no more of her
Than civet, coral, rouge, and years.
But why ask what may not be given?
To some will come a time when change
Itself is beauty, if not heaven.
And her shrill history was done;
At any rate, she never spoke
Like that again to anyone.
Great fury smote the silent air;
And then Llewellyn leapt and fled
Like one with hornets in his hair.
Forever, leaving few to doubt him;
And so, through frost and clicking leaves,
The Tilbury way went on without him.
The stillness of October gold
Went out like beauty from a face.
Priscilla watched it, and grew old.
The roses that had been his fall;
The Scarlet One, as you surmise,
Fled with him, coral, rouge, and all.
Of twenty slow October moons;
And then she vanished, in her turn
To be forgotten, like old tunes.
I should have said, and said no more,
Had not a face once on Broadway
Been one that I had seen before.
But neither time nor penury
Could quench within Llewellyn’s eyes
The shine of his one victory.
Left ruin where they once had reigned;
But on the wreck, as on old shells,
The color of the rose remained.
For him to keep and show again,
Then led him slowly from the crush
Of his cold-shouldered fellow men.
“Not so,” he said; “not so at all:
I’ve tried the world, and found it good,
For more than twenty years this fall.
Will go now in a little while.”
And what the world had left of him
Was partly an unholy guile.
Is what you see, if you have eyes;
For let a man be calm too long,
He pays for much before he dies.
And you have nothing else to do;
Pour not the wine of life too thin
If water means the death of you.
The truth in season to be strong?
Not so; I took the wine of life
Too thin, and I was calm too long.
For me there was no going back;
For I had found another speed,
And I was on the other track.
Or what there might have been to see;
But my speed had a sudden end,
And here you have the end of me.”
But little farther from the truth
To say those worn satiric eyes
Had something of immortal youth.
Be one; or he may, quite as well,
Be gone to find again the Tree
Of Knowledge, out of which he fell.
Of unrepented rouge and coral;
Or in a grave without a name
May be as far off as a moral.