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Edwin Arlington Robinson - The Wandering Jew
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I saw by looking in his eyes  
That they remembered everything;  
And this was how I came to know  
That he was here, still wandering.  
For though the figure and the scene
Were never to be reconciled,  
I knew the man as I had known  
His image when I was a child.  
  
With evidence at every turn,  
I should have held it safe to guess
That all the newness of New York  
Had nothing new in loneliness;  
Yet here was one who might be Noah,  
Or Nathan, or Abimelech,  
Or Lamech, out of ages lost,—
Or, more than all, Melchizedek.  
  
Assured that he was none of these,  
I gave them back their names again,  
To scan once more those endless eyes  
Where all my questions ended then.
I found in them what they revealed  
That I shall not live to forget,  
And wondered if they found in mine  
Compassion that I might regret.  
  
Pity, I learned, was not the least
Of time’s offending benefits  
That had now for so long impugned  
The conservation of his wits:  
Rather it was that I should yield,  
Alone, the fealty that presents
The tribute of a tempered ear  
To an untempered eloquence.  
  
Before I pondered long enough  
On whence he came and who he was,  
I trembled at his ringing wealth
Of manifold anathemas;  
I wondered, while he seared the world,  
What new defection ailed the race,  
And if it mattered how remote  
Our fathers were from such a place.
  
Before there was an hour for me  
To contemplate with less concern  
The crumbling realm awaiting us  
Than his that was beyond return,  
A dawning on the dust of years
Had shaped with an elusive light  
Mirages of remembered scenes  
That were no longer for the sight.  
  
For now the gloom that hid the man  
Became a daylight on his wrath,
And one wherein my fancy viewed  
New lions ramping in his path.  
The old were dead and had no fangs,  
Wherefore he loved them—seeing not  
They were the same that in their time
Had eaten everything they caught.  
  
The world around him was a gift  
Of anguish to his eyes and ears,  
And one that he had long reviled  
As fit for devils, not for seers.
Where, then, was there a place for him  
That on this other side of death  
Saw nothing good, as he had seen  
No good come out of Nazareth?  
  
Yet here there was a reticence,
And I believe his only one,  
That hushed him as if he beheld  
A Presence that would not be gone.  
In such a silence he confessed  
How much there was to be denied;
And he would look at me and live,  
As others might have looked and died.  
  
As if at last he knew again  
That he had always known, his eyes  
Were like to those of one who gazed
On those of One who never dies.  
For such a moment he revealed  
What life has in it to be lost;  
And I could ask if what I saw,  
Before me there, was man or ghost.
  
He may have died so many times  
That all there was of him to see  
Was pride, that kept itself alive  
As too rebellious to be free;  
He may have told, when more than once
Humility seemed imminent,  
How many a lonely time in vain  
The Second Coming came and went.  
  
Whether he still defies or not  
The failure of an angry task
That relegates him out of time  
To chaos, I can only ask.  
But as I knew him, so he was;  
And somewhere among men to-day  
Those old, unyielding eyes may flash,
And flinch—and look the other way.
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