Category: Literature

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

The Three Taverns

The Wandering Jew
I SAW by looking in his eyes
That they remembered everything;
And this was how I came to know
That he was here, still wandering.
For though the figure and the scene 5
Were never to be reconciled,
I knew the man as I had known
His image when I was a child. Continue reading The Wandering Jew

(From Harper's Magazine, July 1920.)

NOTHING to say to all those marriages!
She had made three herself to three of his.
The score was even for them, three to three.
But come to die she found she cared so much:
She thought of children in a burial row; 5
Three children in a burial row were sad.
One man's three women in a burial row
Somehow made her impatient with the man.
And so she said to Laban, "You have done
A good deal right; don't do the last thing wrong. 10
Don't make me lie with those two other women." Continue reading Place for a Third

Reprinted from Mrs. Piozzi's (Thrale's) Autobiography (ed. Hayward, Ticknor and Fields, Boston, 1861), vol. ii. p. 247

THE THREE WARNINGS
A TALE

The tree of deepest root is found
Least willing still to quit the ground;
'Twas therefore said by ancient sages,
That love of life increased with years.
So much, that in our latter stages,
When pains grow sharp and sickness rages,
The greatest love of life appears. Continue reading The Three Warnings