EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

I don't say what God is, but a name That somehow answers us when we are driven To feel and think how little we have to do With what we are.

I shall have more to say when I am dead.

For when a woman is left too much alone, sooner or later she begins to think;- And no man knows what then she may discover.

Love must have wings to fly away from love, and to fly back again.

Youth sees too far to see how near it is To seeing farther.

He knows much of what men paint themselves would blister in the light of what they are.

She knows as well as anyone that pity, having played, soon tires.

Life is the game that must be played.

And thus we all are nighing The truth we fear to know: Death will end our crying For friends that come and go.

Pity is like a knife, sometimes, and it may pierce one who employs it more shrewdly than the victim it would save.

Were it not for love, Poor life would be a ship not worth launching.

To some will come a time when change itself is beauty, if not heaven.

I wonder more and more just where I may have come out if I had never seen Harvard Square.

Do you hear the children singing?

Shake the tree of life itself and bring down fruits unheard of.

Your Dollar is your only Word, / The wrath of it your only fear. / You build it altars tall enough / To make you see, but your are blind; / You cannot leave it long enough / To look before you or behind.

Where's the need of singing now?

No matter what we are, and what we sing, Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel

Friends: people who borrow my books and set wet glasses on them.

I mean you last as long as lies.