Children of the Night | Page 3

to metre, and the continuation is indented two spaces. Also,?some obvious errors have been corrected.]
[This text was first published in 1897, this etext was transcribed from a 1905 printing of the 1897 edition.]
The Children of the Night
A Book of Poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson
To the Memory of my Father and Mother
Contents
The Children of the Night?Three Quatrains?The World?An Old Story?Ballade of a Ship?Ballade by the Fire?Ballade of Broken Flutes?Ballade of Dead Friends?Her Eyes?Two Men?Villanelle of Change?John Evereldown?Luke Havergal?The House on the Hill?Richard Cory?Two Octaves?Calvary?Dear Friends?The Story of the Ashes and the Flame?For Some Poems by Matthew Arnold?Amaryllis?Kosmos?Zola?The Pity of the Leaves?Aaron Stark?The Garden?Cliff Klingenhagen?Charles Carville's Eyes?The Dead Village?Boston?Two Sonnets?The Clerks?Fleming Helphenstine?For a Book by Thomas Hardy?Thomas Hood?The Miracle?Horace to Leuconoe?Reuben Bright?The Altar?The Tavern?Sonnet?George Crabbe?Credo?On the Night of a Friend's Wedding?Sonnet?Verlaine?Sonnet?Supremacy?The Night Before?Walt Whitman?The Chorus of Old Men in "Aegeus"?The Wilderness?Octaves?Two Quatrains?Romance?The Torrent?L'Envoi
The Children of the Night
For those that never know the light,?The darkness is a sullen thing;?And they, the Children of the Night,?Seem lost in Fortune's winnowing.
But some are strong and some are weak, --?And there's the story. House and home?Are shut from countless hearts that seek?World-refuge that will never come.
And if there be no other life,?And if there be no other chance?To weigh their sorrow and their strife?Than in the scales of circumstance,
'T were better, ere the sun go down?Upon the first day we embark,?In life's imbittered sea to drown,?Than sail forever in the dark.
But if there be a soul on earth?So blinded with its own misuse?Of man's revealed, incessant worth,?Or worn with anguish, that it views
No light but for a mortal eye,?No rest but of a mortal sleep,?No God but in a prophet's lie,?No faith for "honest doubt" to keep;
If there be nothing, good or bad,?But chaos for a soul to trust, --?God counts it for a soul gone mad,?And if God be God, He is just.
And if God be God, He is Love;?And though the Dawn be still so dim,?It shows us we have played enough?With creeds that make a fiend of Him.
There is one creed, and only one,?That glorifies God's excellence;?So cherish, that His will be done,?The common creed of common sense.
It is the crimson, not the gray,?That charms the twilight of all time;?It is the promise of the day?That makes the starry sky sublime;
It is the faith within the fear?That holds us to the life we curse; --?So let us in ourselves revere?The Self which is the Universe!
Let us, the Children of the Night,?Put off the cloak that hides the scar!?Let us be Children of the Light,?And tell the ages what we are!
Three Quatrains
I
As long as Fame's imperious music rings?Will poets mock it with crowned words august;?And haggard men will clamber to be kings?As long as Glory weighs itself in dust.
II
Drink to the splendor of the unfulfilled,?Nor shudder for the revels that are done:?The wines that flushed Lucullus are all spilled,?The strings that Nero fingered are all gone.
III
We cannot crown ourselves with everything,?Nor can we coax the Fates for us to quarrel:?No matter what we are, or what we sing,?Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel.
The World
Some are the brothers of all humankind,?And own them, whatsoever their estate;?And some, for sorrow and self-scorn, are blind?With enmity for man's unguarded fate.
For some there is a music all day long?Like flutes in Paradise, they are so glad;?And there is hell's eternal under-song?Of curses and the cries of men gone mad.
Some say the Scheme with love stands luminous,?Some say 't were better back to chaos hurled;?And so 't is what we are that makes for us?The measure and the meaning of the world.
An Old Story
Strange that I did not know him then,?That friend of mine!?I did not even show him then?One friendly sign;
But cursed him for the ways he had?To make me see?My envy of the praise he had?For praising me.
I would have rid the earth of him?Once, in my pride! . . .?I never knew the worth of him?Until he died.
Ballade of a Ship
Down by the flash of the restless water?The dim White Ship like a white bird lay;?Laughing at life and the world they sought her,?And out she swung to the silvering bay.?Then off they flew on their roystering way,?And the keen moon fired the light foam flying?Up from the flood where the faint stars play,?And the bones of the brave in the wave are lying.
'T was a king's fair son with a king's fair daughter,?And full three hundred beside, they say, --?Revelling on for the lone, cold slaughter?So soon to seize them and hide them for aye;?But they danced and they drank and their souls grew gay,?Nor ever they knew of a ghoul's eye spying?Their splendor a flickering phantom to stray?Where the bones of the brave in the wave are lying.
Through the mist of a drunken dream they brought her?(This wild white bird) for the