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Edwin Arlington Robinson - Captain Craig
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I

I doubt if ten men in all Tilbury Town  
Had ever shaken hands with Captain Craig,  
Or called him by his name, or looked at him  
So curiously, or so concernedly,  
As they had looked at ashes; but a few—
Say five or six of us—had found somehow  
The spark in him, and we had fanned it there,  
Choked under, like a jest in Holy Writ,  
By Tilbury prudence. He had lived his life  
And in his way had shared, with all mankind,
Inveterate leave to fashion of himself,  
By some resplendent metamorphosis,  
Whatever he was not. And after time,  
When it had come sufficiently to pass  
That he was going patch-clad through the streets,
Weak, dizzy, chilled, and half starved, he had laid  
Some nerveless fingers on a prudent sleeve,  
And told the sleeve, in furtive confidence,  
Just how it was: “My name is Captain Craig,”  
He said, “and I must eat.” The sleeve moved on,
And after it moved others—one or two;  
For Captain Craig, before the day was done,  
Got back to the scant refuge of his bed  
And shivered into it without a curse—  
Without a murmur even. He was cold,
And old, and hungry; but the worst of it  
Was a forlorn familiar consciousness  
That he had failed again. There was a time  
When he had fancied, if worst came to worst,  
And he could do no more, that he might ask
Of whom he would. But once had been enough,  
And soon there would be nothing more to ask.  
He was himself, and he had lost the speed  
He started with, and he was left behind.  
There was no mystery, no tragedy;
And if they found him lying on his back  
Stone dead there some sharp morning, as they might,—  
Well, once upon a time there was a man—  
Es war einmal ein König, if it pleased him.  
And he was right: there were no men to blame:
There was just a false note in the Tilbury tune—  
A note that able-bodied men might sound  
Hosannas on while Captain Craig lay quiet.  
They might have made him sing by feeding him  
Till he should march again, but probably
Such yielding would have jeopardized the rhythm;  
They found it more melodious to shout  
Right on, with unmolested adoration,  
To keep the tune as it had always been,  
To trust in God, and let the Captain starve.
  
He must have understood that afterwards—  
When we had laid some fuel to the spark  
Of him, and oxidized it—for he laughed  
Out loud and long at us to feel it burn,  
And then, for gratitude, made game of us:
“You are the resurrection and the life,”  
He said, “and I the hymn the Brahmin sings;  
O Fuscus! and we’ll go no more a-roving.”  
We were not quite accoutred for a blast  
Of any lettered nonchalance like that,
And some of us—the five or six of us  
Who found him out—were singularly struck.  
But soon there came assurance of his lips,  
Like phrases out of some sweet instrument  
Man’s hand had never fitted, that he felt
“No penitential shame for what had come,  
No virtuous regret for what had been,—  
But rather a joy to find it in his life  
To be an outcast usher of the soul  
For such as had good courage of the Sun
To pattern Love.” The Captain had one chair;  
And on the bottom of it, like a king,  
For longer time than I dare chronicle,  
Sat with an ancient ease and eulogized  
His opportunity. My friends got out,
Like brokers out of Arcady; but I—  
May be for fascination of the thing,  
Or may be for the larger humor of it—  
Stayed listening, unwearied and unstung.  
When they were gone the Captain’s tuneful ooze
Of rhetoric took on a change; he smiled  
At me and then continued, earnestly:  
“Your friends have had enough of it; but you,  
For a motive hardly vindicated yet  
By prudence or by conscience, have remained;
And that is very good, for I have things  
To tell you: things that are not words alone—  
Which are the ghosts of things—but something firmer.  
“First, would I have you know, for every gift  
Or sacrifice, there are—or there may be—
Two kinds of gratitude: the sudden kind  
We feel for what we take, the larger kind  
We feel for what we give. Once we have learned  
As much as this, we know the truth has been  
Told over to the world a thousand times;—
But we have had no ears to listen yet  
For more than fragments of it: we have heard  
A murmur now and then, and echo here  
And there, and we have made great music of it;  
And we have made innumerable books
To please the Unknown God. Time throws away  
Dead thousands of them, but the God that knows  
No death denies not one: the books all count,  
The songs all count; and yet God’s music has  
No modes, his language has no adjectives.”
  
“You may be right, you may be wrong,” said I;  
“But what has this that you are saying now—  
This nineteenth-century Nirvana-talk—  
To do with you and me?” The Captain raised  
His hand and held it westward, where a patched
And unwashed attic-window filtered in  
What barren light could reach us, and then said,  
With a suave, complacent resonance: “There shines  
The sun. Behold it. We go round and round,  
And wisdom comes to us with every whirl
We count throughout the circuit. We may say  
The child is born, the boy becomes a man,  
The man does this and that, and the man goes,—  
But having said it we have not said much,  
Not very much. Do I fancy, or you think,
That it will be the end of anything  
When I am gone? There was a soldier once  
Who fought one fight and in that fight fell dead.  
Sad friends went after, and they brought him home  
And had a brass band at his funeral,
As you should have at mine; and after that  
A few remembered him. But he was dead,  
They said, and they should have their friend no more.—  
However, there was once a starveling child—  
A ragged-vested little incubus,
Born to be cuffed and frighted out of all  
Capacity for childhood’s happiness—  
Who started out one day, quite suddenly,  
To drown himself. He ran away from home,  
Across the clover-fields and through the woods,
And waited on a rock above a stream,  
Just like a kingfisher. He might have dived,  
Or jumped, or he might not; but anyhow,  
There came along a man who looked at him  
With such an unexpected friendliness,
And talked with him in such a common way,  
That life grew marvelously different:  
What he had lately known for sullen trunks  
And branches, and a world of tedious leaves,  
Was all transmuted; a faint forest wind
That once had made the loneliest of all  
Sad sounds on earth, made now the rarest music;  
And water that had called him once to death  
Now seemed a flowing glory. And that man,  
Born to go down a soldier, did this thing.
Not much to do? Not very much, I grant you:  
Good occupation for a sonneteer,  
Or for a clown, or for a clergyman,  
But small work for a soldier. By the way,  
When you are weary sometimes of your own
Utility, I wonder if you find  
Occasional great comfort pondering  
What power a man has in him to put forth?  
‘Of all the many marvelous things that are,  
Nothing is there more marvelous than man,’
Said Sophocles; and he lived long ago;  
‘And earth, unending ancient of the gods  
He furrows; and the ploughs go back and forth,  
Turning the broken mould, year after year.’…  
  
“I turned a little furrow of my own
Once on a time, and everybody laughed—  
As I laughed afterwards; and I doubt not  
The First Intelligence, which we have drawn  
In our competitive humility  
As if it went forever on two legs,
Had some diversion of it: I believe  
God’s humor is the music of the spheres—  
But even as we draft omnipotence  
Itself to our own image, we pervert  
The courage of an infinite ideal
To finite resignation. You have made  
The cement of your churches out of tears  
And ashes, and the fabric will not stand:  
The shifted walls that you have coaxed and shored  
So long with unavailing compromise
Will crumble down to dust and blow away,  
And younger dust will follow after them;  
Though not the faintest or the farthest whirled  
First atom of the least that ever flew  
Shall be by man defrauded of the touch
God thrilled it with to make a dream for man  
When Science was unborn. And after time,  
When we have earned our spiritual ears,  
And art’s commiseration of the truth  
No longer glorifies the singing beast,
Or venerates the clinquant charlatan,—  
Then shall at last come ringing through the sun,  
Through time, through flesh, a music that is true.  
For wisdom is that music, and all joy  
That wisdom:—you may counterfeit, you think,
The burden of it in a thousand ways;  
But as the bitterness that loads your tears  
Makes Dead Sea swimming easy, so the gloom,  
The penance, and the woeful pride you keep,  
Make bitterness your buoyance of the world.
And at the fairest and the frenziedest  
Alike of your God-fearing festivals,  
You so compound the truth to pamper fear  
That in the doubtful surfeit of your faith  
You clamor for the food that shadows eat.
You call it rapture or deliverance,—  
Passion or exaltation, or what most  
The moment needs, but your faint-heartedness  
Lives in it yet: you quiver and you clutch  
For something larger, something unfulfilled,
Some wiser kind of joy that you shall have  
Never, until you learn to laugh with God.”  
And with a calm Socratic patronage,  
At once half sombre and half humorous,  
The Captain reverently twirled his thumbs
And fixed his eyes on something far away;  
Then, with a gradual gaze, conclusive, shrewd,  
And at the moment unendurable  
For sheer beneficence, he looked at me.  
  
“But the brass band?” I said, not quite at ease
With altruism yet.—He made a sort  
Of reminiscent little inward noise,  
Midway between a chuckle and a laugh,  
And that was all his answer: not a word  
Of explanation or suggestion came
From those tight-smiling lips. And when I left,  
I wondered, as I trod the creaking snow  
And had the world-wide air to breathe again,—  
Though I had seen the tremor of his mouth  
And honored the endurance of his hand—
Whether or not, securely closeted  
Up there in the stived haven of his den,  
The man sat laughing at me; and I felt  
My teeth grind hard together with a quaint  
Revulsion—as I recognize it now—
Not only for my Captain, but as well  
For every smug-faced failure on God’s earth;  
Albeit I could swear, at the same time,  
That there were tears in the old fellow’s eyes.  
I question if in tremors or in tears
There be more guidance to man’s worthiness  
Than—well, say in his prayers. But oftentimes  
It humors us to think that we possess  
By some divine adjustment of our own  
Particular shrewd cells, or something else,
What others, for untutored sympathy,  
Go spirit-fishing more than half their lives  
To catch—like cheerful sinners to catch faith;  
And I have not a doubt but I assumed  
Some egotistic attribute like this
When, cautiously, next morning I reduced  
The fretful qualms of my novitiate,  
For most part, to an undigested pride.  
Only, I live convinced that I regret  
This enterprise no more than I regret
My life; and I am glad that I was born.  
  
That evening, at “The Chrysalis,” I found  
The faces of my comrades all suffused  
With what I chose then to denominate  
Superfluous good feeling. In return,
They loaded me with titles of odd form  
And unexemplified significance,  
Like “Bellows-mender to Prince Æolus,”  
“Pipe-filler to the Hoboscholiast,”  
“Bread-fruit for the Non-Doing,” with one more
That I remember, and a dozen more  
That I forget. I may have been disturbed,  
I do not say that I was not annoyed,  
But something of the same serenity  
That fortified me later made me feel
For their skin-pricking arrows not so much  
Of pain as of a vigorous defect  
In this world’s archery. I might have tried,  
With a flat facetiousness, to demonstrate  
What they had only snapped at and thereby
Made out of my best evidence no more  
Than comfortable food for their conceit;  
But patient wisdom frowned on argument,  
With a side nod for silence, and I smoked  
A series of incurable dry pipes
While Morgan fiddled, with obnoxious care,  
Things that I wished he wouldn’t. Killigrew,  
Drowsed with a fond abstraction, like an ass,  
Lay blinking at me while he grinned and made  
Remarks. The learned Plunket made remarks.
  
It may have been for smoke that I cursed cats  
That night, but I have rather to believe  
As I lay turning, twisting, listening,  
And wondering, between great sleepless yawns,  
What possible satisfaction those dead leaves
Could find in sending shadows to my room  
And swinging them like black rags on a line,  
That I, with a forlorn clear-headedness  
Was ekeing out probation. I had sinned  
In fearing to believe what I believed,
And I was paying for it.—Whimsical,  
You think,—factitious; but “there is no luck,  
No fate, no fortune for us, but the old  
Unswerving and inviolable price  
Gets paid: God sells himself eternally,
But never gives a crust,” my friend had said;  
And while I watched those leaves, and heard those cats,  
And with half mad minuteness analyzed  
The Captain’s attitude and then my own,  
I felt at length as one who throws himself
Down restless on a couch when clouds are dark,  
And shuts his eyes to find, when he wakes up  
And opens them again, what seems at first  
An unfamiliar sunlight in his room  
And in his life—as if the child in him
Had laughed and let him see; and then I knew  
Some prowling superfluity of child  
In me had found the child in Captain Craig  
And let the sunlight reach him. While I slept,  
My thought reshaped itself to friendly dreams,
And in the morning it was with me still.  
  
Through March and shifting April to the time  
When winter first becomes a memory  
My friend the Captain—to my other friend’s  
Incredulous regret that such as he
Should ever get the talons of his talk  
So fixed in my unfledged credulity—  
Kept up the peroration of his life,  
Not yielding at a threshold, nor, I think,  
Too often on the stairs. He made me laugh
Sometimes, and then again he made me weep  
Almost; for I had insufficiency  
Enough in me to make me know the truth  
Within the jest, and I could feel it there  
As well as if it were the folded note
I felt between my fingers. I had said  
Before that I should have to go away  
And leave him for the season; and his eyes  
Had shone with well-becoming interest  
At that intelligence. There was no mist
In them that I remember; but I marked  
An unmistakable self-questioning  
And a reticence of unassumed regret.  
The two together made anxiety—  
Not selfishness, I ventured. I should see
No more of him for six or seven months,  
And I was there to tell him as I might  
What humorous provision we had made  
For keeping him locked up in Tilbury Town.  
That finished—with a few more commonplace
Prosaics on the certified event  
Of my return to find him young again—  
I left him neither vexed, I thought, with us,  
Nor over much at odds with destiny.  
At any rate, save always for a look
That I had seen too often to mistake  
Or to forget, he gave no other sign.  
  
That train began to move; and as it moved,  
I felt a comfortable sudden change  
All over and inside. Partly it seemed
As if the strings of me had all at once  
Gone down a tone or two; and even though  
It made me scowl to think so trivial  
A touch had owned the strength to tighten them,  
It made me laugh to think that I was free.
But free from what—when I began to turn  
The question round—was more than I could say:  
I was no longer vexed with Killigrew,  
Nor more was I possessed with Captain Craig;  
But I was eased of some restraint, I thought,
Not qualified by those amenities,  
And I should have to search the matter down;  
For I was young, and I was very keen.  
So I began to smoke a bad cigar  
That Plunket, in his love, had given me
The night before; and as I smoked I watched  
The flying mirrors for a mile or so,  
Till to the changing glimpse, now sharp, now faint,  
They gave me of the woodland over west,  
A gleam of long-forgotten strenuous years
Came back, when we were Red Men on the trail,  
With Morgan for the big chief Wocky-Bocky;  
And yawning out of that I set myself  
To face again the loud monotonous ride  
That lay before me like a vista drawn
Of bag-racks to the fabled end of things.
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