Robinson

I got a book from the library recently (shocker). Namely, Collected Poems by Edward Arlington Robinson. It apparently is all of his published poems, or at least a large number, running to over 1,000 pages. 

Robinson is probably best known for "Richard Cory", a character profile in verse with a rather bleak twist at the end. Paul Simon reworked it into a Simon and Garfunkel song. He's very good in general at mixing poetic fancy with a natural sense of breath. Not naturalistic, but he sounds human.

Maybe I'll put up an example later in the week. His "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford" is a standout, but way too long for me to retype.

ADDENDUM: I'll vouch for this one.

JOHN GORHAM

“Tell me what you’re doing over here, John Gorham,

Sighing hard and seeming to be sorry when you’re not;

Make me laugh or let me go now, for long faces in the moonlight

Are a sign for me to say again a word that you forgot.”—

 

“I’m over here to tell you what the moon already

May have said or maybe shouted ever since a year ago;

I’m over here to tell you what you are, Jane Wayland,

And to make you rather sorry, I should say, for being so.”—

 

“Tell me what you’re saying to me now, John Gorham,

Or you’ll never see as much of me as ribbons any more;

I’ll vanish in as many ways as I have toes and fingers,

And you’ll not follow far for one where flocks have been before.”—

 

“I’m sorry now you never saw the flocks, Jane Wayland,

But you’re the one to make of them as many as you need.

And then about the vanishing. It’s I who mean to vanish;

And when I’m here no longer you’ll be done with me indeed.”—

 

“That’s a way to tell me what I am, John Gorham!

How am I to know myself until I make you smile?

Try to look as if the moon were making faces at you,

And a little more as if you meant to stay a little while.”—

 

“You are what it is that over rose-blown gardens

Makes a pretty flutter for a season in the sun;

You are what it is that with a mouse, Jane Wayland,

Catches him and lets him go and eats him up for fun.”—

 

“Sure I never took you for a mouse, John Gorham;

All you say is easy, but so far from being true

That I wish you wouldn’t ever be again the one to think so;

For it isn’t cats and butterflies that I would be to you.”—

 

“All your little animals are in one picture—

One I’ve had before me since a year ago to-night;

And the picture where they live will be of you, Jane Wayland,

Till you find a way to kill them or to keep them out of sight.”—

 

“Won’t you ever see me as I am, John Gorham,

Leaving out the foolishness and all I never meant?

Somewhere in me there’s a woman, if you know the way to find her.

Will you like me any better if I prove it and repent?”—

 

“I doubt if I shall ever have the time, Jane Wayland;

And I daresay all this moonlight lying round us might as well

Fall for nothing on the shards of broken urns that are forgotten,

As on two that have no longer much of anything to tell.”