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Home  »  Collected Poems by Robinson, Edwin Arlington  »  1. Captain Craig: II

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935). Collected Poems. 1921.

III. Captain Craig, Etc.

1. Captain Craig: II

II

YET that ride had an end, as all rides have;

And the days coming after took the road

That all days take,—though never one of them

Went by but I got some good thought of it

For Captain Craig. Not that I pitied him,

Or nursed a mordant hunger for his presence;

But what I thought (what Killigrew still thinks)

An irremediable cheerfulness

Was in him and about the name of him,

And I fancy that it may be most of all

For cheer in them that I have saved his letters.

I like to think of him, and how he looked—

Or should have looked—in his renewed estate,

Composing them. They may be dreariness

Unspeakable to you that never saw

The Captain; but to five or six of us

Who knew him they are not so bad as that.

It may be we have smiled not always where

The text itself would seem to indicate

Responsive titillation on our part,—

Yet having smiled at all we have done well,

Knowing that we have touched the ghost of him.

He tells me that he thinks of nothing now

That he would rather do than be himself,

Wisely alive. So let us heed this man:—

“The world that has been old is young again,

The touch that faltered clings; and this is May.

So think of your decrepit pensioner

As one who cherishes the living light,

Forgetful of dead shadows. He may gloat,

And he may not have power in his arms

To make the young world move; but he has eyes

And ears, and he can read the sun. Therefore

Think first of him as one who vegetates

In tune with all the children who laugh best

And longest through the sunshine, though far off

Their laughter, and unheard; for ’t is the child,

O friend, that with his laugh redeems the man.

Time steals the infant, but the child he leaves;

And we, we fighters over of old wars—

We men, we shearers of the Golden Fleece—

Were brutes without him,—brutes to tear the scars

Of one another’s wounds and weep in them,

And then cry out on God that he should flaunt

For life such anguish and flesh-wretchedness.

But let the brute go roaring his own way:

We do not need him, and he loves us not.

“I cannot think of anything to-day

That I would rather do than be myself,

Primevally alive, and have the sun

Shine into me; for on a day like this,

When chaff-parts of a man’s adversities

Are blown by quick spring breezes out of him—

When even a flicker of wind that wakes no more

Than a tuft of grass, or a few young yellow leaves,

Comes like the falling of a prophet’s breath

On altar-flames rekindled of crushed embers,—

Then do I feel, now do I feel, within me

No dreariness, no grief, no discontent,

No twinge of human envy. But I beg

That you forego credentials of the past

For these illuminations of the present,

Or better still, to give the shadow justice,

You let me tell you something: I have yearned

In many another season for these days,

And having them with God’s own pageantry

To make me glad for them,—yes, I have cursed

The sunlight and the breezes and the leaves

To think of men on stretchers or on beds,

Or on foul floors, things without shapes or names,

Made human with paralysis and rags;

Or some poor devil on a battle-field,

Left undiscovered and without the strength

To drag a maggot from his clotted mouth;

Or women working where a man would fall—

Flat-breasted miracles of cheerfulness

Made neuter by the work that no man counts

Until it waits undone; children thrown out

To feed their veins and souls on offal … Yes,

I have had half a mind to blow my brains out

Sometimes; and I have gone from door to door,

Ragged myself, trying to do something—

Crazy, I hope.—But what has this to do

With Spring? Because one half of humankind

Lives here in hell, shall not the other half

Do any more than just for conscience’ sake

Be miserable? Is this the way for us

To lead these creatures up to find the light,—

Or to be drawn down surely to the dark

Again? Which is it? What does the child say?

“But let us not make riot for the child

Untaught, nor let us hold that we may read

The sun but through the shadows; nor, again,

Be we forgetful ever that we keep

The shadows on their side. For evidence,

I might go back a little to the days

When I had hounds and credit, and grave friends

To borrow my books and set wet glasses on them,

And other friends of all sorts, grave and gay,

Of whom one woman and one man stand out

From all the rest, this morning. The man said

One day, as we were riding, ‘Now, you see,

There goes a woman cursed with happiness:

Beauty and wealth, health, horses,—everything

That she could ask, or we could ask, is hers,

Except an inward eye for the dim fact

Of what this dark world is. The cleverness

God gave her—or the devil—cautions her

That she must keep the china cup of life

Filled somehow, and she fills it—runs it over—

Claps her white hands while some one does the sopping

With fingers made, she thinks, for just that purpose,

Giggles and eats and reads and goes to church,

Makes pretty little penitential prayers,

And has an eighteen-carat crucifix

Wrapped up in chamois-skin. She gives enough,

You say; but what is giving like hers worth?

What is a gift without the soul to guide it?

“Poor dears, and they have cancers?—Oh!” she says;

And away she works at that new altar-cloth

For the Reverend Hieronymus Mackintosh—

Third person, Jerry. “Jerry,” she says, “can say

Such lovely things, and make life seem so sweet!”

Jerry can drink, also.—And there she goes,

Like a whirlwind through an orchard in the springtime—

Throwing herself away as if she thought

The world and the whole planetary circus

Were a flourish of apple-blossoms. Look at her!

And here is this infernal world of ours—

And hers, if only she might find it out—

Starving and shrieking, sickening, suppurating,

Whirling to God knows where … But look at her!’

“And after that it came about somehow,

Almost as if the Fates were killing time,

That she, the spendthrift of a thousand joys,

Rode in her turn with me, and in her turn

Made observations: ‘Now there goes a man,’

She said, ‘who feeds his very soul on poison:

No matter what he does, or where he looks,

He finds unhappiness; or, if he fails

To find it, he creates it, and then hugs it:

Pygmalion again for all the world—

Pygmalion gone wrong. You know I think

If when that precious animal was young,

His mother, or some watchful aunt of his,

Had spanked him with Pendennis and Don Juan,

And given him the Lady of the Lake,

Or Cord and Creese, or almost anything,

There might have been a tonic for him? Listen:

When he was possibly nineteen years old

He came to me and said, “I understand

You are in love”—yes, that is what he said,—

“But never mind, it won’t last very long;

It never does; we all get over it.

We have this clinging nature, for you see

The Great Bear shook himself once on a time

And the world is one of many that let go.”

And yet the creature lives, and there you see him.

And he would have this life no fairer thing

Than a certain time for numerous marionettes

To do the Dance of Death. Give him a rose,

And he will tell you it is very sweet,

But only for a day. Most wonderful!

Show him a child, or anything that laughs,

And he begins at once to crunch his wormwood

And then runs on with his “realities.”

What does he know about realities,

Who sees the truth of things almost as well

As Nero saw the Northern Lights? Good gracious!

Can’t you do something with him? Call him something—

Call him a type, and that will make him cry:

One of those not at all unusual,

Prophetic, would-be-Delphic manger-snappers

That always get replaced when they are gone;

Or one of those impenetrable men,

Who seem to carry branded on their foreheads,

“We are abstruse, but not quite so abstruse

As possibly the good Lord may have wished;”

One of those men who never quite confess

That Washington was great;—the kind of man

That everybody knows and always will,—

Shrewd, critical, facetious, insincere,

And for the most part harmless, I’m afraid.

But even then, you might be doing well

To tell him something.’—And I said I would.

“So in one afternoon you see we have

The child in absence—or, to say the least,

In ominous defect,—and in excess

Commensurate, likewise. Now the question is,

Not which was right and which was wrong, for each,

By virtue of one-sidedness, was both;

But rather—to my mind, as heretofore—

Is it better to be blinded by the lights,

Or by the shadows? By the lights, you say?

The shadows are all devils, and the lights

Gleam guiding and eternal? Very good;

But while you say so do not quite forget

That sunshine has a devil of its own,

And one that we, for the great craft of him,

But vaguely recognize. The marvel is

That this persuasive and especial devil,

By grace of his extreme transparency,

Precludes all common vision of him; yet

There is one way to glimpse him and a way,

As I believe, to test him,—granted once

That we have ousted prejudice, which means

That we have made magnanimous advance

Through self-acquaintance. Not an easy thing

For some of us; impossible, may be,

For most of us: the woman and the man

I cited, for example, would have wrought

The most intractable conglomerate

Of everything, if they had set themselves

To analyze themselves and not each other;

If only for the sake of self-respect,

They would have come to no place but the same

Wherefrom they started; one would have lived awhile

In paradise without defending it,

And one in hell without enjoying it;

And each had been dissuaded neither more

Nor less thereafter. There are such on earth

As might have been composed primarily

For mortal warning: he was one of them,

And she—the devil makes us hesitate.

’T is easy to read words writ well with ink

That makes a good black mark on smooth white paper;

But words are done sometimes with other ink

Whereof the smooth white paper gives no sign

Till science brings it out; and here we come

To knowledge, and the way to test a devil.

“To most of us, you say, and you say well,

This demon of the sunlight is a stranger;

But if you break the sunlight of yourself,

Project it, and observe the quaint shades of it,

I have a shrewd suspicion you may find

That even as a name lives unrevealed

In ink that waits an agent, so it is

The devil—or this devil—hides himself

To all the diagnoses we have made

Save one. The quest of him is hard enough—

As hard as truth; but once we seem to know

That his compound obsequiousness prevails

Unferreted within us, we may find

That sympathy, which aureoles itself

To superfluity from you and me,

May stand against the soul for five or six

Persistent and indubitable streaks

Of irritating brilliance, out of which

A man may read, if he have knowledge in him,

Proportionate attest of ignorance,

Hypocrisy, good-heartedness, conceit,

Indifference,—by which a man may learn

That even courage may not make him glad

For laughter when that laughter is itself

The tribute of recriminating groans.

Nor are the shapes of obsolescent creeds

Much longer to flit near enough to make

Men glad for living in a world like this;

For wisdom, courage, knowledge, and the faith

Which has the soul and is the soul of reason—

These are the world’s achievers. And the child—

The child that is the saviour of all ages,

The prophet and the poet, the crown-bearer,

Must yet with Love’s unhonored fortitude,

Survive to cherish and attain for us

The candor and the generosity,

By leave of which we smile if we bring back

The first revealing flash that wakened us

When wisdom like a shaft of dungeon-light

Came searching down to find us.

“Halfway back

I made a mild allusion to the Fates,

Not knowing then that ever I should have

Dream-visions of them, painted on the air,—

Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. Faint-hued

They seem, but with a faintness never fading,

Unblurred by gloom, unshattered by the sun,

Still with eternal color, colorless,

They move and they remain. The while I write

These very words I see them,—Atropos,

Lachesis, Clotho; and the last is laughing.

When Clotho laughs, Atropos rattles her shears;

But Clotho keeps on laughing just the same.

Some time when I have dreamed that Atropos

Has laughed, I’ll tell you how the colors change—

The colors that are changeless, colorless.”

I fear I may have answered Captain Craig’s

Epistle Number One with what he chose,

Good-humoredly but anxiously, to take

For something that was not all reverence;

From Number Two it would have seemed almost

As if the flanges of the old man’s faith

Had slipped the treacherous rails of my allegiance,

Leaving him by the roadside, humorously

Upset, with nothing more convivial

To do than be facetious and austere:—

“If you decry Don César de Bazan,

There is an imperfection in your vitals.

Flamboyant and old-fashioned? Overdone?

Romantico-robustious?—Dear young man,

There are fifteen thousand ways to be one-sided,

And I have indicated two of them

Already. Now you bait me with a third—

As if it were a spider with nine legs;

But what it is that you would have me do,

What fatherly wrath you most anticipate,

I lack the needed impulse to discern;

Though I who shape no songs of any sort,

I who have made no music, thrilled no canvas,—

I who have added nothing to the world

The world would reckon save long-squandered wit—

Might with half-pardonable reverence

Beguile my faith, maybe, to the forlorn

Extent of some sequestered murmuring

Anent the vanities. No doubt I should,

If mine were the one life that I have lived;

But with a few good glimpses I have had

Of heaven through the little holes in hell,

I can half understand what price it is

The poet pays, at one time and another,

For those indemnifying interludes

That are to be the kernel in what lives

To shrine him when the new-born men come singing.

“So do I comprehend what I have read

From even the squeezed items of account

Which I have to my credit in that book

Whereof the leaves are ages and the text

Eternity. What do I care to-day

For pages that have nothing? I have lived,

And I have died, and I have lived again;

And I am very comfortable. Yes,

Though I look back through barren years enough

To make me seem—as I transmute myself

In downward retrospect from what I am—

As unproductive and as unconvinced

Of living bread and the soul’s eternal draught

As a frog on a Passover-cake in a streamless desert,—

Still do I trust the light that I have earned,

And having earned, received. You shake your head,

But do not say that you will shake it off.

“Meanwhile I have the flowers and the grass,

My brothers here the trees, and all July

To make me joyous. Why do you shake your head?

Why do you laugh?—because you are so young?

Do you think if you laugh hard enough the truth

Will go to sleep? Do you think of any couch

Made soft enough to put the truth to sleep?

Do you think there are no proper comedies

But yours that have the fashion? For example,

Do you think that I forget, or shall forget,

One friendless, fat, fantastic nondescript

Who knew the ways of laughter on low roads,—

A vagabond, a drunkard, and a sponge,

But always a free creature with a soul?

I bring him back, though not without misgivings,

And caution you to damn him sparingly.

“Count Pretzel von Würzburger, the Obscene

(The beggar may have had another name,

But no man to my knowledge ever knew it)

Was a poet and a skeptic and a critic,

And in his own mad manner a musician:

He found an old piano in a bar-room,

And it was his career—three nights a week,

From ten o’clock till twelve—to make it rattle;

And then, when I was just far down enough

To sit and watch him with his long straight hair,

And pity him, and think he looked like Liszt,

I might have glorified a musical

Steam-engine, or a xylophone. The Count

Played half of everything and ‘improvised’

The rest: he told me once that he was born

With a genius in him that ‘prohibited

Complete fidelity,’ and that his art

‘Confessed vagaries,’ therefore. But I made

Kind reckoning of his vagaries then:

I had the whole great pathos of the man

To purify me, and all sorts of music

To give me spiritual nourishment

And cerebral athletics; for the Count

Played indiscriminately—with an f,

And with incurable presto—cradle-songs

And carnivals, spring-songs and funeral marches,

The Marseillaise and Schubert’s Serenade—

And always in a way to make me think

Procrustes had the germ of music in him.

And when this interesting reprobate

Began to talk—then there were more vagaries:

He made a reeking fetich of all filth,

Apparently; but there was yet revealed

About him, through his words and on his flesh,

That ostracizing nimbus of a soul’s

Abject, apologetic purity—

That phosphorescence of sincerity—

Which indicates the curse and the salvation

Of a life wherein starved art may never perish.

“One evening I remember clearliest

Of all that I passed with him. Having wrought,

With his nerve-ploughing ingenuity,

The Träumerei into a Titan’s nightmare,

The man sat down across the table from me

And all at once was ominously decent.

‘“The more we measure what is ours to use,”’

He said then, wiping his froth-plastered mouth

With the inside of his hand, ‘“the less we groan

For what the gods refuse.” I’ve had that sleeved

A decade for you. Now but one more stein,

And I shall be prevailed upon to read

The only sonnet I have ever made;

And after that, if you propitiate

Gambrinus, I shall play you that Andante

As the world has never heard it played before.’

So saying, he produced a piece of paper,

Unfolded it, and read, ‘SONNET UNIQUE

DE PRETZEL VON WURZBURGER, DIT L’OBSCÉNE:

“‘Carmichael had a kind of joke-disease,

And he had queer things fastened on his wall.

There are three green china frogs that I recall

More potently than anything, for these

Three frogs have demonstrated, by degrees,

What curse was on the man to make him fall:

“They are not ordinary frogs at all,

They are the Frogs of Aristophanes.”

“‘God! how he laughed whenever he said that;

And how we caught from one another’s eyes

The flash of what a tongue could never tell!

We always laughed at him, no matter what

The joke was worth. But when a man’s brain dies,

We are not always glad … Poor Carmichael!’

“‘I am a sowbug and a necrophile,’

Said Pretzel, ‘and the gods are growing old;

The stars are singing Golden hair to gray,

Green leaf to yellow leaf,—or chlorophyl

To xanthophyl, to be more scientific,—

So speed me one more stein. You may believe

That I’m a mendicant, but I am not:

For though it look to you that I go begging,

The truth is I go giving—giving all

My strength and all my personality,

My wisdom and experience—all myself,

To make it final—for your preservation;

Though I be not the one thing or the other,

Though I strike between the sunset and the dawn,

Though I be cliff-rubbed wreckage on the shoals

Of Circumstance,—doubt not that I comprise,

Far more than my appearance. Here he comes;

Now drink to good old Pretzel! Drink down Pretzel!

Quousque tandem, Pretzel, and O Lord,

How long! But let regret go hang: the good

Die first, and of the poor did many cease

To be. Beethoven after Wordsworth. Prosit!

There were geniuses among the trilobites,

And I suspect that I was one of them.’

“How much of him was earnest and how much

Fantastic, I know not; nor do I need

Profounder knowledge to exonerate

The squalor or the folly of a man

Than consciousness—though even the crude laugh

Of indigent Priapus follow it—

That I get good of him. And if you like him,

Then some time in the future, past a doubt,

You’ll have him in a book, make metres of him,—

To the great delight of Mr. Killigrew,

And the grief of all your kinsmen. Christian shame

And self-confuted Orientalism

For the more sagacious of them; vulture-tracks

Of my Promethean bile for the rest of them;

And that will be a joke. There’s nothing quite

So funny as a joke that’s lost on earth

And laughed at by the gods. Your devil knows it.

“I come to like your Mr. Killigrew,

And I rejoice that you speak well of him.

The sprouts of human blossoming are in him,

And useful eyes—if he will open them;

But one thing ails the man. He smiles too much.

He comes to see me once or twice a week,

And I must tell him that he smiles too much.

If I were Socrates, it would be simple.”

Epistle Number Three was longer coming.

I waited for it, even worried for it—

Though Killigrew, and of his own free will,

Had written reassuring little scraps

From time to time, and I had valued them

The more for being his. “The Sage,” he said,

“From all that I can see, is doing well—

I should say very well. Three meals a day,

Siestas, and innumerable pipes—

Not to the tune of water on the stones,

But rather to the tune of his own Ego,

Which seems to be about the same as God.

But I was always weak in metaphysics,

And pray therefore that you be lenient.

I’m going to be married in December,

And I have made a poem that will scan—

So Plunket says. You said the other wouldn’t:

“Augustus Plunket, Ph.D.,

And oh, the Bishop’s daughter;

A very learned man was he

And in twelve weeks he got her;

And oh, she was as fair to see

As pippins on the pippin tree …

Tu, tui, tibi, te,—chubs in the mill water.

“Connotative, succinct, and erudite;

Three dots to boot. Now goodman Killigrew

May wind an epic one of these glad years,

And after that who knoweth but the Lord—

The Lord of Hosts who is the King of Glory?”

Still, when the Captain’s own words were before me,

I seemed to read from them, or into them,

The protest of a mortuary joy

Not all substantiating Killigrew’s

Off-hand assurance. The man’s face came back

The while I read them, and that look again,

Which I had seen so often, came back with it.

I do not know that I can say just why,

But I felt the feathery touch of something wrong:—

“Since last I wrote—and I fear weeks have gone

Too far for me to leave my gratitude

Unuttered for its own acknowledgment—

I have won, without the magic of Amphion

Without the songs of Orpheus or Apollo,

The frank regard—and with it, if you like,

The fledged respect—of three quick-footed friends.

(‘Nothing is there more marvelous than man,’

Said Sophocles; and I say after him:

‘He traps and captures, all-inventive one,

The light birds and the creatures of the wold,

And in his nets the fishes of the sea.’)

Once they were pictures, painted on the air,

Faint with eternal color, colorless,—

But now they are not pictures, they are fowls.

“At first they stood aloof and cocked their small,

Smooth, prudent heads at me and made as if,

With a cryptic idiotic melancholy,

To look authoritative and sagacious;

But when I tossed a piece of apple to them,

They scattered back with a discord of short squawks

And then came forward with a craftiness

That made me think of Eden. Atropos

Came first, and having grabbed the morsel up,

Ran flapping far away and out of sight,

With Clotho and Lachesis hard after her;

But finally the three fared all alike,

And next day I persuaded them with corn.

In a week they came and had it from my fingers

And looked up at me while I pinched their bills

And made them sneeze. Count Pretzel’s Carmichael

Had said they were not ordinary birds

At all,—and they are not: they are the Fates,

Foredoomed of their own insufficiency

To be assimilated.—Do not think,

Because in my contented isolation

It suits me at this time to be jocose,

That I am nailing reason to the cross,

Or that I set the bauble and the bells

Above the crucible; for I do nought,

Say nought, but with an ancient levity

That is the forbear of all earnestness.

“The cross, I said.—I had a dream last night:

A dream not like to any other dream

That I remember. I was all alone,

Sitting as I do now beneath a tree,

But looking not, as I am looking now,

Against the sunlight. There was neither sun

Nor moon, nor do I think of any stars;

Yet there was light, and there were cedar trees,

And there were sycamores. I lay at rest,

Or should have seemed at rest, within a trough

Between two giant roots. A weariness

Was on me, and I would have gone to sleep,

But I had not the courage. If I slept,

I feared that I should never wake again;

And if I did not sleep I should go mad,

And with my own dull tools, which I had used

With wretched skill so long, hack out my life.

And while I lay there, tortured out of death,

Faint waves of cold, as if the dead were breathing,

Came over me and through me; and I felt

Quick fearful tears of anguish on my face

And in my throat. But soon, and in the distance,

Concealed, importunate, there was a sound

Of coming steps,—and I was not afraid;

No, I was not afraid then, I was glad;

For I could feel, with every thought, the Man,

The Mystery, the Child, a footfall nearer.

Then, when he stood before me, there was no

Surprise, there was no questioning: I knew him,

As I had known him always; and he smiled.

‘Why are you here?’ he asked; and reaching down,

He took up my dull blades and rubbed his thumb

Across the edges of them and then smiled

Once more.—‘I was a carpenter,’ I said,

‘But there was nothing in the world to do.’—

‘Nothing?’ said he.—‘No, nothing,’ I replied.—

‘But are you sure,’ he asked, ‘that you have skill?

And are you sure that you have learned your trade?

No, you are not.’—He looked at me and laughed

As he said that; but I did not laugh then,

Although I might have laughed.—‘They are dull,’ said he;

‘They were not very sharp if they were ground;

But they are what you have, and they will earn

What you have not. So take them as they are,

Grind them and clean them, put new handles to them,

And then go learn your trade in Nazareth.

Only be sure that you find Nazareth.’—

‘But if I starve—what then?’ said I.—He smiled.

“Now I call that as curious a dream

As ever Meleager’s mother had,—

Æneas, Alcibiades, or Jacob.

I’ll not except the scientist who dreamed

That he was Adam and that he was Eve

At the same time; or yet that other man

Who dreamed that he was Æschylus, reborn

To clutch, combine, compensate, and adjust

The plunging and unfathomable chorus

Wherein we catch, like a bacchanale through thunder,

The chanting of the new Eumenides,

Implacable, renascent, farcical,

Triumphant, and American. He did it,

But did it in a dream. When he awoke

One phrase of it remained; one verse of it

Went singing through the remnant of his life

Like a bag-pipe through a mad-house.—He died young,

And if I ponder the small history

That I have gleaned of him by scattered roads,

The more do I rejoice that he died young.

That measure would have chased him all his days,

Defeated him, deposed him, wasted him,

And shrewdly ruined him—though in that ruin

There would have lived, as always it has lived,

In ruin as in failure, the supreme

Fulfilment unexpressed, the rhythm of God

That beats unheard through songs of shattered men

Who dream but cannot sound it.—He declined,

From all that I have ever learned of him,

With absolute good-humor. No complaint,

No groaning at the burden which is light,

No brain-waste of impatience—‘Never mind,’

He whispered, ‘for I might have written Odes.’

“Speaking of odes now makes me think of ballads.

Your admirable Mr. Killigrew

Has latterly committed what he calls

A Ballad of London—London ‘Town,’ of course—

And he has wished that I pass judgment on

He says there is a ‘generosity’

About it, and a ‘sympathetic insight;’

And there are strong lines in it, so he says.

But who am I that he should make of me

A judge? You are his friend, and you know best

The measure of his jingle. I am old,

And you are young. Be sure, I may go back

To squeak for you the tunes of yesterday

On my old fiddle—or what’s left of it—

And give you as I’m able a young sound;

But all the while I do it I remain

One of Apollo’s pensioners (and yours),

An usher in the Palace of the Sun,

A candidate for mattocks and trombones

(The brass-band will be indispensable),

A patron of high science, but no critic.

So I shall have to tell him, I suppose,

That I read nothing now but Wordsworth, Pope,

Lucretius, Robert Burns, and William Shakespeare.

Now this is Mr. Killigrew’s performance:

“‘Say, do you go to London Town,

You with the golden feather?’—

‘And if I go to London Town

With my golden feather?’—

‘These autumn roads are bright and brown,

The season wears a russet crown;

And if you go to London Town,

We’ll go down together.’

“I cannot say for certain, but I think

The brown bright nightingale was half assuaged

Before your Mr. Killigrew was born.

If I have erred in my chronology,

No matter,—for the feathered man sings now:

“‘Yes, I go to London Town’

(Merrily waved the feather),

‘And if you go to London Town,

Yes, we’ll go together.’

So in the autumn bright and brown,

Just as the year began to frown,

All the way to London Town

Rode the two together.

“‘I go to marry a fair maid’

(Lightly swung the feather)—

‘Pardie, a true and loyal maid’

(Oh, the swinging feather!)—

‘For us the wedding gold is weighed,

For us the feast will soon be laid;

We’ll make a gallant show,’ he said,—

‘She and I together.’

“The feathered man may do a thousand things,

And all go smiling; but the feathered man

May do too much. Now mark how he continues:

“‘And you—you go to London Town?’

(Breezes waved the feather)—

‘Yes, I go to London Town.’

(Ah, the stinging feather!)—

‘Why do you go, my merry blade?

Like me, to marry a fair maid?’—

‘Why do I go? … God knows,’ he said;

And on they rode together.

“Now you have read it through, and you know best

What worth it has. We fellows with gray hair

Who march with sticks to music that is gray

Judge not your vanguard fifing. You are one

To judge; and you will tell me what you think.

Barring the Town, the Fair Maid, and the Feather,

The dialogue and those parentheses,

You cherish it, undoubtedly. ‘Pardie!’

You call it, with a few conservative

Allowances, an excellent small thing

For patient inexperience to do:

Derivative, you say,—still rather pretty.

But what is wrong with Mr. Killigrew?

Is he in love, or has he read Rossetti?—

Forgive me! I am old and garrulous …

When are you coming back to Tilbury Town?”