Three time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edwin Arlington Robinson died in New York City on this day in 1935 (aged 65).
"Ballad Of Dead Friends"
As we the withered ferns
By the roadway lying,
Time, the jester, spurns
All our prayers and prying --
All our tears and sighing,
Sorrow, change, and woe --
All our where-and-whying
For friends that come and go.
By the roadway lying,
Time, the jester, spurns
All our prayers and prying --
All our tears and sighing,
Sorrow, change, and woe --
All our where-and-whying
For friends that come and go.
Life awakes and burns,
Age and death defying,
Till at last it learns
All but Love is dying;
Love's the trade we're plying,
God has willed it so;
Shrouds are what we're buying
For friends that come and go.
Age and death defying,
Till at last it learns
All but Love is dying;
Love's the trade we're plying,
God has willed it so;
Shrouds are what we're buying
For friends that come and go.
Man forever yearns
For the thing that's flying.
Everywhere he turns,
Men to dust are drying, --
Dust that wanders, eying
(With eyes that hardly glow)
New faces, dimly spying
For friends that come and go.
For the thing that's flying.
Everywhere he turns,
Men to dust are drying, --
Dust that wanders, eying
(With eyes that hardly glow)
New faces, dimly spying
For friends that come and go.
ENVOY
And thus we all are nighing
The truth we fear to know:
Death will end our crying
For friends that come and go.
The truth we fear to know:
Death will end our crying
For friends that come and go.
*
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was the first of the great American modernist poets."No poet ever understood loneliness and separateness better than Robinson," James Dickey has observed. Robinson’s lyric poems illuminate the hearts and minds of the most unlikely subjects—the downtrodden, the bereft, and the misunderstood. Even while writing in meter and rhyme, he used everyday language with unprecedented power, wit, and sensitivity. With his keen understanding of ordinary people and a gift for harnessing the rhythms of conversational speech, Robinson created the vivid character portraits for which he is best known, among them "Aunt Imogen," "Isaac and Archibald," "Miniver Cheevy," and "Richard Cory." Most of his poems are set in the fictive Tilbury Town—based on his boyhood home of Gardiner, Maine—but his work reaches far beyond its particular locality in its focus on struggle and redemption in human experience. READ more here: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/robinson-poems-by-edwi…/
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