Things change

WHENEVER Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Those deconstructionists who say only the text matters are sure missing out on some interesting reading. From today's Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of Edwin Arlington Robinson, born in Head Tide, Maine (1869).

His family was wealthy, and he expected a life of ease, but his father died, the family's investments in the West went bad, and his mother contracted an illness so contagious that no undertaker would touch her body. Edward and his brothers had to dress her, make the coffin, and bury her themselves.

Robinson continued to write poetry unsuccessfully and he lived on the brink of starvation, until one day Kermit Roosevelt read Robinson's poems and he gave them to his father, Theodore Roosevelt, who gave him a cushy job in a Customs House.

President Roosevelt told him, "I expect you to think poetry first and customs second." All Robinson had to do was show up, read the morning newspaper, and leave it on his chair to prove he had been in.

This sustained him until he started to write poetry that won some praise. Edwin Arlington Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1922, the first year it was awarded. And he won it again in 1925 and 1928.

By the time he died, Edwin Robinson was one of the best-known poets in the country.

Teddy Roosevelt is one of those historical figures that turn up in the most unlikely places, like da Vinci and his cannons. Good thing for us he gave Robinson a hand up.

Mr. Flood’s Party

OLD Eben Flood, climbing along one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.
The road was his with not a native near;
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:

“Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again, and we may not have many more;
The bird is on the wing, the poet says,
And you and I have said it here before.
Drink to the bird.” He raised up to the light
The jug that he had gone so far to fill,
And answered huskily: “Well, Mr. Flood,
Since you propose it, I believe I will.”

Alone, as if enduring to the end
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,
He stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn.
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honored him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Eben’s eyes were dim.

Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child
Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,
He set the jug down slowly at his feet
With trembling care, knowing that most things break;
And only when assured that on firm earth
It stood, as the uncertain lives of men
Assuredly did not, he paced away,
And with his hand extended paused again:

“Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this
In a long time; and many a change has come
To both of us, I fear, since last it was
We had a drop together. Welcome home!”
Convivially returning with himself,
Again he raised the jug up to the light;
And with an acquiescent quaver said:
“Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might.

“Only a very little, Mr. Flood—
For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do.”
So, for the time, apparently it did,
And Eben evidently thought so too;
For soon amid the silver loneliness
Of night he lifted up his voice and sang,
Secure, with only two moons listening,
Until the whole harmonious landscape rang—

“For auld lang syne.” The weary throat gave out,
The last word wavered; and the song being done,
He raised again the jug regretfully
And shook his head, and was again alone.
There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below—
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

Poems from Bartleby.com; photo via Modern American Poetry