Poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson

The Man Against the Sky

Between me and the sunset, like a dome  
Against the glory of a world on fire,  
Now burned a sudden hill,  
Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,  
With nothing on it for the flame to kill
Save one who moved and was alone up there  
To loom before the chaos and the glare  
As if he were the last god going home  
Unto his last desire.  
 
Dark, marvelous, and inscrutable he moved on
Till down the fiery distance he was gone,  
Like one of those eternal, remote things  
That range across a man’s imaginings  
When a sure music fills him and he knows  
What he may say thereafter to few men,—
The touch of ages having wrought  
An echo and a glimpse of what he thought  
A phantom or a legend until then;  
For whether lighted over ways that save,  
Or lured from all repose,
If he go on too far to find a grave,  
Mostly alone he goes.  
 
Even he, who stood where I had found him,  
On high with fire all round him,  
Who moved along the molten west,
And over the round hill’s crest  
That seemed half ready with him to go down,  
Flame-bitten and flame-cleft,  
As if there were to be no last thing left  
Of a nameless unimaginable town,—
Even he who climbed and vanished may have taken  
Down to the perils of a depth not known,  
From death defended though by men forsaken,  
The bread that every man must eat alone;  
He may have walked while others hardly dared
Look on to see him stand where many fell;  
And upward out of that, as out of hell,  
He may have sung and striven  
To mount where more of him shall yet be given,  
Bereft of all retreat,
To sevenfold heat,—  
As on a day when three in Dura shared  
The furnace, and were spared  
For glory by that king of Babylon  
Who made himself so great that God, who heard,
Covered him with long feathers, like a bird.  
 
Again, he may have gone down easily,  
By comfortable altitudes, and found,  
As always, underneath him solid ground  
Whereon to be sufficient and to stand
Possessed already of the promised land,  
Far stretched and fair to see:  
A good sight, verily,  
And one to make the eyes of her who bore him  
Shine glad with hidden tears.
Why question of his ease of who before him,  
In one place or another where they left  
Their names as far behind them as their bones,  
And yet by dint of slaughter toil and theft,  
And shrewdly sharpened stones,
Carved hard the way for his ascendency  
Through deserts of lost years?  
Why trouble him now who sees and hears  
No more than what his innocence requires,  
And therefore to no other height aspires
Than one at which he neither quails nor tires?  
He may do more by seeing what he sees  
Than others eager for iniquities;  
He may, by seeing all things for the best,  
Incite futurity to do the rest.
 
Or with an even likelihood,  
He may have met with atrabilious eyes  
The fires of time on equal terms and passed  
Indifferently down, until at last  
His only kind of grandeur would have been,
Apparently, in being seen.  
He may have had for evil or for good  
No argument; he may have had no care  
For what without himself went anywhere  
To failure or to glory, and least of all
For such a stale, flamboyant miracle;  
He may have been the prophet of an art  
Immovable to old idolatries;  
He may have been a player without a part,  
Annoyed that even the sun should have the skies
For such a flaming way to advertise;  
He may have been a painter sick at heart  
With Nature’s toiling for a new surprise;  
He may have been a cynic, who now, for all  
Of anything divine that his effete
Negation may have tasted,  
Saw truth in his own image, rather small,  
Forbore to fever the ephemeral,  
Found any barren height a good retreat  
From any swarming street,
And in the sun saw power superbly wasted;  
And when the primitive old-fashioned stars  
Came out again to shine on joys and wars  
More primitive, and all arrayed for doom,  
He may have proved a world a sorry thing
In his imagining,  
And life a lighted highway to the tomb.  
 
Or, mounting with infirm unsearching tread,  
His hopes to chaos led,  
He may have stumbled up there from the past,
And with an aching strangeness viewed the last  
Abysmal conflagration of his dreams,—  
A flame where nothing seems  
To burn but flame itself, by nothing fed;  
And while it all went out,
Not even the faint anodyne of doubt  
May then have eased a painful going down  
From pictured heights of power and lost renown,  
Revealed at length to his outlived endeavor  
Remote and unapproachable forever;
And at his heart there may have gnawed  
Sick memories of a dead faith foiled and flawed  
And long dishonored by the living death  
Assigned alike by chance  
To brutes and hierophants;
And anguish fallen on those he loved around him  
May once have dealt the last blow to confound him,  
And so have left him as death leaves a child,  
Who sees it all too near;  
And he who knows no young way to forget
May struggle to the tomb unreconciled.  
Whatever suns may rise or set  
There may be nothing kinder for him here  
Than shafts and agonies;  
And under these
He may cry out and stay on horribly;  
Or, seeing in death too small a thing to fear,  
He may go forward like a stoic Roman  
Where pangs and terrors in his pathway lie,—  
Or, seizing the swift logic of a woman,
Curse God and die.  
 
Or maybe there, like many another one  
Who might have stood aloft and looked ahead,  
Black-drawn against wild red,  
He may have built, unawed by fiery gules
That in him no commotion stirred,  
A living reason out of molecules  
Why molecules occurred,  
And one for smiling when he might have sighed  
Had he seen far enough,
And in the same inevitable stuff  
Discovered an odd reason too for pride  
In being what he must have been by laws  
Infrangible and for no kind of cause.  
Deterred by no confusion or surprise
He may have seen with his mechanic eyes  
A world without a meaning, and had room,  
Alone amid magnificence and doom,  
To build himself an airy monument  
That should, or fail him in his vague intent,
Outlast an accidental universe—  
To call it nothing worse—  
Or, by the burrowing guile  
Of Time disintegrated and effaced,  
Like once-remembered mighty trees go down
To ruin, of which by man may now be traced  
No part sufficient even to be rotten,  
And in the book of things that are forgotten  
Is entered as a thing not quite worth while.  
He may have been so great
That satraps would have shivered at his frown,  
And all he prized alive may rule a state  
No larger than a grave that holds a clown;  
He may have been a master of his fate,  
And of his atoms,—ready as another
In his emergence to exonerate  
His father and his mother;  
He may have been a captain of a host,  
Self-eloquent and ripe for prodigies,  
Doomed here to swell by dangerous degrees,
And then give up the ghost.  
Nahum’s great grasshoppers were such as these,  
Sun-scattered and soon lost.  
 
Whatever the dark road he may have taken,  
This man who stood on high
And faced alone the sky,  
Whatever drove or lured or guided him,—  
A vision answering a faith unshaken,  
An easy trust assumed of easy trials,  
A sick negation born of weak denials,
A crazed abhorrence of an old condition,  
A blind attendance on a brief ambition,—  
Whatever stayed him or derided him,  
His way was even as ours;  
And we, with all our wounds and all our powers,
Must each await alone at his own height  
Another darkness or another light;  
And there, of our poor self dominion reft,  
If inference and reason shun  
Hell, Heaven, and Oblivion,
May thwarted will (perforce precarious,  
But for our conservation better thus)  
Have no misgiving left  
Of doing yet what here we leave undone?  
Or if unto the last of these we cleave,
Believing or protesting we believe  
In such an idle and ephemeral  
Florescence of the diabolical,—  
If, robbed of two fond old enormities,  
Our being had no onward auguries,
What then were this great love of ours to say  
For launching other lives to voyage again  
A little farther into time and pain,  
A little faster in a futile chase  
For a kingdom and a power and a Race
That would have still in sight  
A manifest end of ashes and eternal night?  
Is this the music of the toys we shake  
So loud,—as if there might be no mistake  
Somewhere in our indomitable will?
Are we no greater than the noise we make  
Along one blind atomic pilgrimage  
Whereon by crass chance billeted we go  
Because our brains and bones and cartilage  
Will have it so?
If this we say, then let us all be still  
About our share in it, and live and die  
More quietly thereby.  
 
Where was he going, this man against the sky?  
You know not, nor do I.
But this we know, if we know anything:  
That we may laugh and fight and sing  
And of our transience here make offering  
To an orient Word that will not be erased,  
Or, save in incommunicable gleams
Too permanent for dreams,  
Be found or known.  
No tonic and ambitious irritant  
Of increase or of want  
Has made an otherwise insensate waste
Of ages overthrown  
A ruthless, veiled, implacable foretaste  
Of other ages that are still to be  
Depleted and rewarded variously  
Because a few, by fate’s economy,
Shall seem to move the world the way it goes;  
No soft evangel of equality,  
Safe-cradled in a communal repose  
That huddles into death and may at last  
Be covered well with equatorial snows—
And all for what, the devil only knows—  
Will aggregate an inkling to confirm  
The credit of a sage or of a worm,  
Or tell us why one man in five  
Should have a care to stay alive
While in his heart he feels no violence  
Laid on his humor and intelligence  
When infant Science makes a pleasant face  
And waves again that hollow toy, the Race;  
No planetary trap where souls are wrought
For nothing but the sake of being caught  
And sent again to nothing will attune  
Itself to any key of any reason  
Why man should hunger through another season  
To find out why ’twere better late than soon
To go away and let the sun and moon  
And all the silly stars illuminate  
A place for creeping things,  
And those that root and trumpet and have wings,  
And herd and ruminate,
Or dive and flash and poise in rivers and seas,  
Or by their loyal tails in lofty trees  
Hang screeching lewd victorious derision  
Of man’s immortal vision.  
Shall we, because Eternity records
Too vast an answer for the time-born words  
We spell, whereof so many are dead that once  
In our capricious lexicons  
Were so alive and final, hear no more  
The Word itself, the living word
That none alive has ever heard  
Or ever spelt,  
And few have ever felt  
Without the fears and old surrenderings  
And terrors that began
When Death let fall a feather from his wings  
And humbled the first man?  
Because the weight of our humility,  
Wherefrom we gain  
A little wisdom and much pain,
Falls here too sore and there too tedious,  
Are we in anguish or complacency,  
Not looking far enough ahead  
To see by what mad couriers we are led  
Along the roads of the ridiculous,
To pity ourselves and laugh at faith  
And while we curse life bear it?  
And if we see the soul’s dead end in death,  
Are we to fear it?  
What folly is here that has not yet a name
Unless we say outright that we are liars?  
What have we seen beyond our sunset fires  
That lights again the way by which we came?  
Why pay we such a price, and one we give  
So clamoringly, for each racked empty day
That leads one more last human hope away,  
As quiet fiends would lead past our crazed eyes  
Our children to an unseen sacrifice?  
If after all that we have lived and thought,  
All comes to Nought,—
If there be nothing after Now,  
And we be nothing anyhow,  
And we know that,—why live?  
’Twere sure but weaklings’ vain distress  
To suffer dungeons where so many doors
Will open on the cold eternal shores  
That look sheer down  
To the dark tideless floods of Nothingness  
Where all who know may drown.

1. The Dead Village
2. Momus
3. Cliff Klingenhagen
4. How Annandale Went Out
5. Neighbors

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