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Edwin Arlington Robinson - The Book of Annandale
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I

Partly to think, more to be left alone,  
George Annandale said something to his friends—  
A word or two, brusque, but yet smoothed enough  
To suit their funeral gaze—and went upstairs;  
And there, in the one room that he could call
His own, he found a sort of meaningless  
Annoyance in the mute familiar things  
That filled it; for the grate’s monotonous gleam  
Was not the gleam that he had known before,  
The books were not the books that used to be,
The place was not the place. There was a lack  
Of something; and the certitude of death  
Itself, as with a furtive questioning,  
Hovered, and he could not yet understand.  
He knew that she was gone—there was no need
Of any argued proof to tell him that,  
For they had buried her that afternoon,  
Under the leaves and snow; and still there was  
A doubt, a pitiless doubt, a plunging doubt,  
That struck him, and upstartled when it struck,
The vision, the old thought in him. There was  
A lack, and one that wrenched him; but it was  
Not that—not that. There was a present sense  
Of something indeterminably near—  
The soul-clutch of a prescient emptiness
That would not be foreboding. And if not,  
What then?—or was it anything at all?  
Yes, it was something—it was everything—  
But what was everything? or anything?  
Tired of time, bewildered, he sat down;
But in his chair he kept on wondering  
That he should feel so desolately strange  
And yet—for all he knew that he had lost  
More of the world than most men ever win—  
So curiously calm. And he was left
Unanswered and unsatisfied: there came  
No clearer meaning to him than had come  
Before; the old abstraction was the best  
That he could find, the farthest he could go;  
To that was no beginning and no end—
No end that he could reach. So he must learn  
To live the surest and the largest life  
Attainable in him, would he divine  
The meaning of the dream and of the words  
That he had written, without knowing why,
On sheets that he had bound up like a book  
And covered with red leather. There it was—  
There in his desk, the record he had made,  
The spiritual plaything of his life:  
There were the words no eyes had ever seen
Save his; there were the words that were not made  
For glory or for gold. The pretty wife  
Whom he had loved and lost had not so much  
As heard of them. They were not made for her.  
His love had been so much the life of her,
And hers had been so much the life of him,  
That any wayward phrasing on his part  
Would have had no moment. Neither had lived enough  
To know the book, albeit one of them  
Had grown enough to write it. There it was,
However, though he knew not why it was:  
There was the book, but it was not for her,  
For she was dead. And yet, there was the book.  
  
Thus would his fancy circle out and out,  
And out and in again, till he would make
As if with a large freedom to crush down  
Those under-thoughts. He covered with his hands  
His tired eyes, and waited: he could hear—  
Or partly feel and hear, mechanically—  
The sound of talk, with now and then the steps
And skirts of some one scudding on the stairs,  
Forgetful of the nerveless funeral feet  
That she had brought with her; and more than once  
There came to him a call as of a voice—  
A voice of love returning—but not hers.
Whose he knew not, nor dreamed; nor did he know,  
Nor did he dream, in his blurred loneliness  
Of thought, what all the rest might think of him.  
  
For it had come at last, and she was gone  
With all the vanished women of old time,—
And she was never coming back again.  
Yes, they had buried her that afternoon,  
Under the frozen leaves and the cold earth,  
Under the leaves and snow. The flickering week,  
The sharp and certain day, and the long drowse
Were over, and the man was left alone.  
He knew the loss—therefore it puzzled him  
That he should sit so long there as he did,  
And bring the whole thing back—the love, the trust,  
The pallor, the poor face, and the faint way
She last had looked at him—and yet not weep,  
Or even choose to look about the room  
To see how sad it was; and once or twice  
He winked and pinched his eyes against the flame  
And hoped there might be tears. But hope was all,
And all to him was nothing: he was lost.  
And yet he was not lost: he was astray—  
Out of his life and in another life;  
And in the stillness of this other life  
He wondered and he drowsed. He wondered when
It was, and wondered if it ever was  
On earth that he had known the other face—  
The searching face, the eloquent, strange face—  
That with a sightless beauty looked at him  
And with a speechless promise uttered words
That were not the world’s words, or any kind  
That he had known before. What was it, then?  
What was it held him—fascinated him?  
Why should he not be human? He could sigh,  
And he could even groan,—but what of that?
There was no grief left in him. Was he glad?  
  
Yet how could he be glad, or reconciled,  
Or anything but wretched and undone?  
How could he be so frigid and inert—  
So like a man with water in his veins
Where blood had been a little while before?  
How could he sit shut in there like a snail?  
What ailed him? What was on him? Was he glad?  
Over and over again the question came,  
Unanswered and unchanged,—and there he was.
But what in heaven’s name did it all mean?  
If he had lived as other men had lived,  
If home had ever shown itself to be  
The counterfeit that others had called home,  
Then to this undivined resource of his
There were some key; but now … Philosophy?  
Yes, he could reason in a kind of way  
That he was glad for Miriam’s release—  
Much as he might be glad to see his friends  
Laid out around him with their grave-clothes on,
And this life done for them; but something else  
There was that foundered reason, overwhelmed it,  
And with a chilled, intuitive rebuff  
Beat back the self-cajoling sophistries  
That his half-tutored thought would half-project.
  
What was it, then? Had he become transformed  
And hardened through long watches and long grief  
Into a loveless, feelingless dead thing  
That brooded like a man, breathed like a man,—  
Did everything but ache? And was a day
To come some time when feeling should return  
Forever to drive off that other face—  
The lineless, indistinguishable face—  
That once had thrilled itself between his own  
And hers there on the pillow,—and again
Between him and the coffin-lid had flashed  
Like fate before it closed,—and at the last  
Had come, as it should seem, to stay with him,  
Bidden or not? He were a stranger then,  
Foredrowsed awhile by some deceiving draught
Of poppied anguish, to the covert grief  
And the stark loneliness that waited him,  
And for the time were cursedly endowed  
With a dull trust that shammed indifference  
To knowing there would be no touch again
Of her small hand on his, no silencing  
Of her quick lips on his, no feminine  
Completeness and love-fragrance in the house,  
No sound of some one singing any more,  
No smoothing of slow fingers on his hair,
No shimmer of pink slippers on brown tiles.  
  
But there was nothing, nothing, in all that:  
He had not fooled himself so much as that;  
He might be dreaming or he might be sick,  
But not like that. There was no place for fear,
No reason for remorse. There was the book  
That he had made, though.… It might be the book;  
Perhaps he might find something in the book;  
But no, there could be nothing there at all—  
He knew it word for word; but what it meant—
He was not sure that he had written it  
For what it meant; and he was not quite sure  
That he had written it;—more likely it  
Was all a paper ghost.… But the dead wife  
Was real: he knew all that, for he had been
To see them bury her; and he had seen  
The flowers and the snow and the stripped limbs  
Of trees; and he had heard the preacher pray;  
And he was back again, and he was glad. 
Was he a brute? No, he was not a brute:
He was a man—like any other man:  
He had loved and married his wife Miriam,  
They had lived a little while in paradise  
And she was gone; and that was all of it.  
  
But no, not all of it—not all of it:
There was the book again; something in that  
Pursued him, overpowered him, put out  
The futile strength of all his whys and wheres,  
And left him unintelligibly numb—  
Too numb to care for anything but rest.
It must have been a curious kind of book  
That he had made it: it was a drowsy book  
At any rate. The very thought of it  
Was like the taste of some impossible drink—  
A taste that had no taste, but for all that
Had mixed with it a strange thought-cordial,  
So potent that it somehow killed in him  
The ultimate need of doubting any more—  
Of asking any more. Did he but live  
The life that he must live, there were no more
To seek.—The rest of it was on the way.  
  
Still there was nothing, nothing, in all this—  
Nothing that he cared now to reconcile  
With reason or with sorrow. All he knew  
For certain was that he was tired out:
His flesh was heavy and his blood beat small;  
Something supreme had been wrenched out of him  
As if to make vague room for something else.  
He had been through too much. Yes, he would stay  
There where he was and rest.—And there he stayed;
The daylight became twilight, and he stayed;  
The flame and the face faded, and he slept.  
And they had buried her that afternoon,  
Under the tight-screwed lid of a long box,  
Under the earth, under the leaves and snow.
  

II

Look where she would, feed conscience how she might,  
There was but one way now for Damaris—  
One straight way that was hers, hers to defend,  
At hand, imperious. But the nearness of it,  
The flesh-bewildering simplicity,
And the plain strangeness of it, thrilled again  
That wretched little quivering single string  
Which yielded not, but held her to the place  
Where now for five triumphant years had slept  
The flameless dust of Argan.—He was gone,
The good man she had married long ago;  
And she had lived, and living she had learned,  
And surely there was nothing to regret:  
Much happiness had been for each of them,  
And they had been like lovers to the last:
And after that, and long, long after that,  
Her tears had washed out more of widowed grief  
Than smiles had ever told of other joy.—  
But could she, looking back, find anything  
That should return to her in the new time,
And with relentless magic uncreate  
This temple of new love where she had thrown  
Dead sorrow on the altar of new life?  
Only one thing, only one thread was left;  
When she broke that, when reason snapped it off,
And once for all, baffled, the grave let go  
The trivial hideous hold it had on her,—  
Then she were free, free to be what she would,  
Free to be what she was.—And yet she stayed,  
Leashed, as it were, and with a cobweb strand,
Close to a tombstone—maybe to starve there.  
  
But why to starve? And why stay there at all?  
Why not make one good leap and then be done  
Forever and at once with Argan’s ghost  
And all such outworn churchyard servitude?
For it was Argan’s ghost that held the string,  
And her sick fancy that held Argan’s ghost—  
Held it and pitied it. She laughed, almost,  
There for the moment; but her strained eyes filled  
With tears, and she was angry for those tears—
Angry at first, then proud, then sorry for them.  
So she grew calm; and after a vain chase  
For thoughts more vain, she questioned of herself  
What measure of primeval doubts and fears  
Were still to be gone through that she might win
Persuasion of her strength and of herself  
To be what she could see that she must be,  
No matter where the ghost was.—And the more  
She lived, the more she came to recognize  
That something out of her thrilled ignorance
Was luminously, proudly being born,  
And thereby proving, thought by forward thought,  
The prowess of its image; and she learned  
At length to look right on to the long days  
Before her without fearing. She could watch
The coming course of them as if they were  
No more than birds, that slowly, silently,  
And irretrievably should wing themselves  
Uncounted out of sight. And when he came  
Again, she might be free—she would be free.
Else, when he looked at her she must look down,  
Defeated, and malignly dispossessed  
Of what was hers to prove and in the proving  
Wisely to consecrate. And if the plague  
Of that perverse defeat should come to be—
If at that sickening end she were to find  
Herself to be the same poor prisoner  
That he had found at first—then she must lose  
All sight and sound of him, she must abjure  
All possible thought of him; for he would go
So far and for so long from her that love—  
Yes, even a love like his, exiled enough,  
Might for another’s touch be born again—  
Born to be lost and starved for and not found;  
Or, at the next, the second wretchedest,
It might go mutely flickering down and out,  
And on some incomplete and piteous day,  
Some perilous day to come, she might at last  
Learn, with a noxious freedom, what it is  
To be at peace with ghosts. Then were the blow
Thrice deadlier than any kind of death  
Could ever be: to know that she had won  
The truth too late—there were the dregs indeed  
Of wisdom, and of love the final thrust  
Unmerciful; and there where now did lie
So plain before her the straight radiance  
Of what was her appointed way to take,  
Were only the bleak ruts of an old road  
That stretched ahead and faded and lay far  
Through deserts of unconscionable years.
  
But vampire thoughts like these confessed the doubt  
That love denied; and once, if never again,  
They should be turned away. They might come back—  
More craftily, perchance, they might come back—  
And with a spirit-thirst insatiable
Finish the strength of her; but now, today  
She would have none of them. She knew that love  
Was true, that he was true, that she was true;  
And should a death-bed snare that she had made  
So long ago be stretched inexorably
Through all her life, only to be unspun  
With her last breathing? And were bats and threads,  
Accursedly devised with watered gules,  
To be Love’s heraldry? What were it worth  
To live and to find out that life were life
But for an unrequited incubus  
Of outlawed shame that would not be thrown down  
Till she had thrown down fear and overcome  
The woman that was yet so much of her  
That she might yet go mad? What were it worth
To live, to linger, and to be condemned  
In her submission to a common thought  
That clogged itself and made of its first faith  
Its last impediment? What augured it,  
Now in this quick beginning of new life,
To clutch the sunlight and be feeling back,  
Back with a scared fantastic fearfulness,  
To touch, not knowing why, the vexed-up ghost  
Of what was gone?  
  
        Yes, there was Argan’s face,
Pallid and pinched and ruinously marked  
With big pathetic bones; there were his eyes,  
Quiet and large, fixed wistfully on hers;  
And there, close-pressed again within her own,  
Quivered his cold thin fingers. And, ah! yes,
There were the words, those dying words again,  
And hers that answered when she promised him.  
Promised him? … yes. And had she known the truth  
Of what she felt that he should ask her that,  
And had she known the love that was to be,
God knew that she could not have told him then.  
But then she knew it not, nor thought of it;  
There was no need of it; nor was there need  
Of any problematical support  
Whereto to cling while she convinced herself
That love’s intuitive utility,  
Inexorably merciful, had proved  
That what was human was unpermanent  
And what was flesh was ashes. She had told  
Him then that she would love no other man,
That there was not another man on earth  
Whom she could ever love, or who could make  
So much as a love thought go through her brain;  
And he had smiled. And just before he died  
His lips had made as if to say something—
Something that passed unwhispered with his breath,  
Out of her reach, out of all quest of it.  
And then, could she have known enough to know  
The meaning of her grief, the folly of it,  
The faithlessness and the proud anguish of it,
There might be now no threads to punish her,  
No vampire thoughts to suck the coward blood,  
The life, the very soul of her.  
  
        Yes, Yes,  
They might come back.… But why should they come back?
Why was it she had suffered? Why had she  
Struggled and grown these years to demonstrate  
That close without those hovering clouds of gloom  
And through them here and there forever gleamed  
The Light itself, the life, the love, the glory,
Which was of its own radiance good proof  
That all the rest was darkness and blind sight?  
And who was she? The woman she had known—  
The woman she had petted and called “I”—  
The woman she had pitied, and at last
Commiserated for the most abject  
And persecuted of all womankind,—  
Could it be she that had sought out the way  
To measure and thereby to quench in her  
The woman’s fear—the fear of her not fearing?
A nervous little laugh that lost itself,  
Like logic in a dream, fluttered her thoughts  
An instant there that ever she should ask  
What she might then have told so easily—  
So easily that Annandale had frowned,
Had he been given wholly to be told  
The truth of what had never been before  
So passionately, so inevitably  
Confessed.  
  
        For she could see from where she sat
The sheets that he had bound up like a book  
And covered with red leather; and her eyes  
Could see between the pages of the book,  
Though her eyes, like them, were closed. And she could read  
As well as if she had them in her hand,
What he had written on them long ago,—  
Six years ago, when he was waiting for her.  
She might as well have said that she could see  
The man himself, as once he would have looked  
Had she been there to watch him while he wrote
Those words, and all for her.… For her whose face  
Had flashed itself, prophetic and unseen,  
But not unspirited, between the life  
That would have been without her and the life  
That he had gathered up like frozen roots
Out of a grave-clod lying at his feet,  
Unconsciously, and as unconsciously  
Transplanted and revived. He did not know  
The kind of life that he had found, nor did  
He doubt, not knowing it; but well he knew
That it was life—new life, and that the old  
Might then with unimprisoned wings go free,  
Onward and all along to its own light,  
Through the appointed shadow.  
  
        While she gazed
Upon it there she felt within herself  
The growing of a newer consciousness—  
The pride of something fairer than her first  
Outclamoring of interdicted thought  
Had ever quite foretold; and all at once
There quivered and requivered through her flesh,  
Like music, like the sound of an old song,  
Triumphant, love-remembered murmurings  
Of what for passion’s innocence had been  
Too mightily, too perilously hers,
Ever to be reclaimed and realized  
Until today. Today she could throw off  
The burden that had held her down so long,  
And she could stand upright, and she could see  
The way to take, with eyes that had in them
No gleam but of the spirit. Day or night,  
No matter; she could see what was to see—  
All that had been till now shut out from her,  
The service, the fulfillment, and the truth,  
And thus the cruel wiseness of it all.
  
So Damaris, more like than anything  
To one long prisoned in a twilight cave  
With hovering bats for all companionship,  
And after time set free to fight the sun,  
Laughed out, so glad she was to recognize
The test of what had been, through all her folly,  
The courage of her conscience; for she knew,  
Now on a late-flushed autumn afternoon  
That else had been too bodeful of dead things  
To be endured with aught but the same old
Inert, self-contradicted martyrdom  
Which she had known so long, that she could look  
Right forward through the years, nor any more  
Shrink with a cringing prescience to behold  
The glitter of dead summer on the grass,
Or the brown-glimmered crimson of still trees  
Across the intervale where flashed along,  
Black-silvered, the cold river. She had found,  
As if by some transcendent freakishness  
Of reason, the glad life that she had sought
Where naught but obvious clouds could ever be—  
Clouds to put out the sunlight from her eyes,  
And to put out the love-light from her soul.  
But they were gone—now they were all gone;  
And with a whimsied pathos, like the mist
Of grief that clings to new-found happiness  
Hard wrought, she might have pity for the small  
Defeated quest of them that brushed her sight  
Like flying lint—lint that had once been thread.…  
Yes, like an anodyne, the voice of him,
There were the words that he had made for her,  
For her alone. The more she thought of them  
The more she lived them, and the more she knew  
The life-grip and the pulse of warm strength in them.  
They were the first and last of words to her,
And there was in them a far questioning  
That had for long been variously at work,  
Divinely and elusively at work,  
With her, and with the grace that had been hers;  
They were eternal words, and they diffused
A flame of meaning that men’s lexicons  
Had never kindled; they were choral words  
That harmonized with love’s enduring chords  
Like wisdom with release; triumphant words  
That rang like elemental orisons
Through ages out of ages; words that fed  
Love’s hunger in the spirit; words that smote;  
Thrilled words that echoed, and barbed words that clung;—  
And every one of them was like a friend  
Whose obstinate fidelity, well tried,
Had found at last and irresistibly  
The way to her close conscience, and thereby  
Revealed the unsubstantial Nemesis  
That she had clutched and shuddered at so long;  
And every one of them was like a real
And ringing voice, clear toned and absolute,  
But of a love-subdued authority  
That uttered thrice the plain significance  
Of what had else been generously vague  
And indolently true. It may have been
The triumph and the magic of the soul,  
Unspeakably revealed, that finally  
Had reconciled the grim probationing  
Of wisdom with unalterable faith,  
But she could feel—not knowing what it was,
For the sheer freedom of it—a new joy  
That humanized the latent wizardry  
Of his prophetic voice and put for it  
The man within the music.  
  
        So it came
To pass, like many a long-compelled emprise  
That with its first accomplishment almost  
Annihilates its own severity,  
That she could find, whenever she might look,  
The certified achievement of a love
That had endured, self-guarded and supreme,  
To the glad end of all that wavering;  
And she could see that now the flickering world  
Of autumn was awake with sudden bloom,  
New-born, perforce, of a slow bourgeoning.
And she had found what more than half had been  
The grave-deluded, flesh-bewildered fear  
Which men and women struggle to call faith,  
To be the paid progression to an end  
Whereat she knew the foresight and the strength
To glorify the gift of what was hers,  
To vindicate the truth of what she was.  
And had it come to her so suddenly?  
There was a pity and a weariness  
In asking that, and a great needlessness;
For now there were no wretched quivering strings  
That held her to the churchyard any more:  
There were no thoughts that flapped themselves like bats  
Around her any more. The shield of love  
Was clean, and she had paid enough to learn
How it had always been so. And the truth, 
Like silence after some far victory,  
Had come to her, and she had found it out  
As if it were a vision, a thing born  
So suddenly!—just as a flower is born,
Or as a world is born—so suddenly.
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