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    Children of the Night
    Children of the Night
    Children of the Night
    Ebook116 pages56 minutes

    Children of the Night

    By Edwin Arlington Robinson

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 27, 2013
    Author

    Edwin Arlington Robinson

    The American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in 1869 in the Maine village of Head Tide and spent his school days in nearby Gardiner. Robinson developed a love of poetry in his youth, a love that endured until his death in New York in 1935. Robinson attended Harvard during 1891-1893 and published some of his early poetry in The Harvard Advocate. Although committed to becoming a writer, his path would not be an easy one. Income from Robinson's chosen pursuit was insufficient to maintain his modest lifestyle, much less meet his various responsibilities, and he worked at times as a secretary, a time-keeper, and a customs clerk, all the while continuing to write. After years of relative obscurity, he secured some incremental recognition with the publication of his poetry collections The Children of the Night, The Town Down the River, and The Man Against the Sky. During the First World War and in the decade that followed, Robinson composed a cycle of epic narrative poems, written in blank verse, that were modern in style but drew upon classic themes in substance. Against the unfolding tragedy of a world at war, Robinson composed a trilogy based on the legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. The trilogy included Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), and Tristram (1927). During the same period, Edwin Arlington Robinson would win the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry twice; first for his Collected Poems (published in 1921), and again for The Man Who Died Twice (published in 1924). With Tristram, he would at last reap hard-won financial rewards for his literary labors. Edwin Arlington Robinson's Arthurian cycle reflects the poet's most mature work.

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      Book preview

      Children of the Night - Edwin Arlington Robinson

      Project Gutenberg's The Children of the Night, by Edwin Arlington Robinson

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: The Children of the Night

      Author: Edwin Arlington Robinson

      Release Date: July 1, 2008 [EBook #313]

      Last Updated: February 7, 2013

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT ***

      Produced by A. Light, L. Bowser, and David Widger

      THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT

      by Edwin Arlington Robinson

      [Maine Poet — 1869-1935.]

      1905 printing of the 1897 edition

      CONTENTS

      The Children of the Night

      Three Quatrains

      The World

      An Old Story

      Ballade of a Ship

      Ballade by the Fire

      Ballade of Broken Flutes

      Ballade of Dead Friends

      Her Eyes

      Two Men

      Villanelle of Change

      John Evereldown

      Luke Havergal

      The House on the Hill

      Richard Cory

      Two Octaves

      Calvary

      Dear Friends

      The Story of the Ashes and the Flame

      For Some Poems by Matthew Arnold

      Amaryllis

      Kosmos

      Zola

      The Pity of the Leaves

      Aaron Stark

      The Garden

      Cliff Klingenhagen

      Charles Carville's Eyes

      The Dead Village

      Boston

      Two Sonnets

      The Clerks

      Fleming Helphenstine

      For a Book by Thomas Hardy

      Thomas Hood

      The Miracle

      Horace to Leuconoe

      Reuben Bright

      The Altar

      The Tavern

      Sonnet

      George Crabbe

      Credo

      On the Night of a Friend's Wedding

      Sonnet

      Verlaine

      Sonnet

      Supremacy

      The Night Before

      Walt Whitman

      The Chorus of Old Men in Aegeus

      The Wilderness

      Octaves

      Two Quatrains

      To the Memory of my Father and Mother

      The Children of the Night

           For those that never know the light,

            The darkness is a sullen thing;

           And they, the Children of the Night,

            Seem lost in Fortune's winnowing.

           But some are strong and some are weak, —

            And there's the story.  House and home

           Are shut from countless hearts that seek

            World-refuge that will never come.

           And if there be no other life,

            And if there be no other chance

           To weigh their sorrow and their strife

            Than in the scales of circumstance,

           'T were better, ere the sun go down

            Upon the first day we embark,

           In life's imbittered sea to drown,

            Than sail forever in the dark.

           But if there be a soul on earth

            So blinded with its own misuse

           Of man's revealed, incessant worth,

            Or worn with anguish, that it views

           No light but for a mortal eye,

            No rest but of a mortal sleep,

           No God but in a prophet's lie,

            No faith for honest doubt to keep;

           If there be nothing, good or bad,

            But chaos for a soul to trust, —

           God counts it for a soul gone mad,

            And if God be God, He is just.

           And if God be God, He is Love;

            And though the Dawn be still so dim,

           It shows us we have played enough

            With creeds that make a fiend of Him.

           There is one creed, and only one,

            That glorifies God's excellence;

           So cherish, that His will be done,

            The common creed of common sense.

           It is the crimson, not the gray,

            That charms the twilight of all time;

           It is the promise of the day

            That makes the starry sky sublime;

           It is the faith within the fear

            That holds us to the life we curse; —

           So let us in ourselves revere

            The Self which is the Universe!

           Let us, the Children of the Night,

            Put off the cloak that hides the scar!

           Let us be Children of the Light,

            And tell the ages what we are!

      Three Quatrains

             I

           As long as Fame's imperious music rings

            Will poets mock it with crowned words august;

           And haggard men will clamber to be kings

            As long as Glory weighs itself in dust.

             II

           Drink to the splendor of the unfulfilled,

            Nor shudder for the revels that are done:

           The wines that flushed Lucullus are all spilled,

            The strings that Nero fingered are all gone.

             III

           We cannot crown ourselves with everything,

            Nor can we coax the Fates for us to quarrel:

           No matter what we are, or what we sing,

            Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel.

      The World

           Some are the brothers of all humankind,

            And own them, whatsoever their estate;

           And some, for sorrow and self-scorn, are blind

            With enmity for man's unguarded fate.

           For some there is a music all day long

            Like flutes in Paradise, they are so glad;

           And there is hell's eternal under-song

            Of curses and the cries of men gone mad.

           Some say the Scheme with love stands luminous,

            Some say 't were better back to chaos hurled;

           And so 't is what we are that makes for us

            The

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