| Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935). Collected Poems. 1921. |
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| III. Captain Craig, Etc. |
| 8. Erasmus |
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| WHEN he protested, not too solemnly, | |
| That for a world’s achieving maintenance | |
| The crust of overdone divinity | |
| Lacked aliment, they called it recreance; | |
| And when he chose through his own glass to scan | 5 |
| Sick Europe, and reduced, unyieldingly, | |
| The monk within the cassock to the man | |
| Within the monk, they called it heresy. | |
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| And when he made so perilously bold | |
| As to be scattered forth in black and white, | 10 |
| Good fathers looked askance at him and rolled | |
| Their inward eyes in anguish and affright; | |
| There were some of them did shake at what was told, | |
| And they shook best who knew that he was right. | |
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