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Edwin Arlington Robinson - Avon`s Harvest
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Since I had seen his eyes and felt his breath; 
And it was not for some uncertain hours
After they came that either would say how long 
That might have been. It should have been much longer. 
All you may add will be your own invention, 
For I have told you all there is to tell. 
Tomorrow I shall have another birthday,
And with it there may come another message— 
Although I cannot see the need of it, 
Or much more need of drowning, if that’s all 
Men drown for—when they drown. You know as much 
As I know about that, though I’ve a right,
If not a reason, to be on my guard; 
And only God knows what good that will do. 
Now you may get some air. Good night!—and thank you.” 
He smiled, but I would rather he had not. 

I wished that Avon’s wife would go to sleep,
But whether she found sleep that night or not 
I do not know. I was awake for hours, 
Toiling in vain to let myself believe 
That Avon’s apparition was a dream, 
And that he might have added, for romance,
The part that I had taken home with me 
For reasons not in Avon’s dictionary. 
But each recurrent memory of his eyes, 
And of the man himself that I had known 
So long and well, made soon of all my toil
An evanescent and a vain evasion; 
And it was half as in expectancy 
That I obeyed the summons of his wife 
A little before dawn, and was again 
With Avon in the room where I had left him,
But not with the same Avon I had left. 
The doctor, an august authority, 
With eminence abroad as well as here, 
Looked hard at me as if I were the doctor 
And he the friend. “I have had eyes on Avon
For more than half a year,” he said to me, 
“And I have wondered often what it was 
That I could see that I was not to see. 
Though he was in the chair where you are looking, 
I told his wife—I had to tell her something— 
It was a nightmare and an aneurism; 
And so, or partly so, I’ll say it was. 
The last without the first will be enough 
For the newspapers and the undertaker; 
Yet if we doctors were not all immune
From death, disease, and curiosity, 
My diagnosis would be sorry for me. 
He died, you know, because he was afraid— 
And he had been afraid for a long time; 
And we who knew him well would all agree
To fancy there was rather more than fear. 
The door was locked inside—they broke it in 
To find him—but she heard him when it came. 
There are no signs of any visitors, 
Or need of them. If I were not a child
Of science, I should say it was the devil. 
I don’t believe it was another woman, 
And surely it was not another man.”
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