Read "Calverly's" by Edwin Arlington Robinson online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
WE go no more to Calverly's, / For there the lights are few and low; / And who are there to see by them, / Or what they see, we do not know.
Poor strangers of another tongue
May now creep in from anywhere, / And we, forgotten, be no more
Than twilight on a ruin there.
We two, the remnant. All the rest
Are cold and quiet. You nor I,
Nor fiddle now, nor flagon-lid, / May ring them back from where they lie.
No fame delays oblivion
For them, but something yet survives:
A record written fair, could we
But read the book of scattered lives.
There'll be a page for Leffingwell, / And one for Lingard, the Moon-calf; / And who knows what for Clavering, / Who died because he couldn't laugh?
Who knows or cares? No sign is here, / No face, no voice, no memory; / No Lingard with his eerie joy, / No Clavering, no Calverly.
We cannot have them here with us
To say where their light lives are gone, / Or if they be of other stuff
Than are the moons of Ilion.
So, be their place of one estate
With ashes, echoes, and old wars, -
Or ever we be of the night, / Or we be lost among the stars.