Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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

II. The Children of the Night

27. Thomas Hood

THE MAN who cloaked his bitterness within

This winding-sheet of puns and pleasantries,

God never gave to look with common eyes

Upon a world of anguish and of sin:

His brother was the branded man of Lynn;

And there are woven with his jollities

The nameless and eternal tragedies

That render hope and hopelessness akin.

We laugh, and crown him; but anon we feel

A still chord sorrow-swept,—a weird unrest

And thin dim shadows home to midnight steal,

As if the very ghost of mirth were dead—

As if the joys of time to dream had fled,

Or sailed away with Ines to the West.