Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.
John Gorham
By Edwin Arlington Robinson
T
Sighing hard and seeming to be sorry when you’re not.
Make me laugh or let me go now, for long faces in the moonlight
Are a sign for me to say again a word that you forgot.”
May have said or maybe shouted ever since a year ago;
I’m over here to tell you what you are, Jane Wayland,
And to make you rather sorry, I should say, for being so.”
Or you’ll never see as much of me as ribbons any more;
I’ll vanish in as many ways as I have toes and fingers,
And you’ll not follow far for one where flocks have been before.”
But you’re the one to make of them as many as you need.
And then about the vanishing: it’s I who mean to vanish;
And when I’m here no longer you’ll be done with me indeed.”
How am I to know myself until I make you smile?
Try to look as if the moon were making faces at you,
And a little more as if you meant to stay a little while.”
Makes a pretty flutter for a season in the sun.
You are what it is that with a mouse, Jane Wayland,
Catches him and let’s him go and eats him up for fun.”
All you say is easy, but so far from being true
That I wish you wouldn’t ever be again the one to think so;
For it isn’t cats and butterflies that I would be to you.”
One I’ve had before me since a year ago to-night;
And the picture where they live will be of you, Jane Wayland,
Till you find a way to kill them or to keep them out of sight.”
Leaving out the foolishness and all I never meant?
Somewhere in me there’s a woman, if you know the way to find her—
Will you like me any better if I prove it and repent?”
And I dare say all this moonlight lying round us might as well
Fall for nothing on the shards of broken urns that are forgotten,
As on two that have no longer much of anything to tell.”