“Wednesday” Poem (late): Aaron Stark, Erasmus

I've been sick and busy, but you will hear no more about that from me, because this is not a personal blog.

I was browsing the old Oscar Williams American Poetry anthology and enjoyed some of the Edwin Arlington Robinson poems. Robinson got his big break when Theodore Roosevelt publicly lauded Robinson's fascinating “Luke Havergal.” I checked around for some other public domain stuff and found two that I think I like, both about outsiders, one in Maine and one in late Medieval Europe. Here they are.

Aaron Stark
Edwin Arlington Robinson

Withal a meager man was Aaron Stark—
Cursed and unkempt, shrewd, shriveled, and morose.
A miser was he, with a miser's nose,
And eyes like little dollars in the dark.
His thin, pinched mouth was nothing but a mark;
And when he spoke there came like sullen blows
Through scattered fangs a few snarled words and close,
As if a cur were chary of its bark.

Glad for the murmur of his hard renown,
Year after year he shambled through the town—
A loveless exile moving with a staff;
And oftentimes there crept into his ears
A sound of alien pity, touched with tears—
And then (and only then) did Aaron laugh.

Erasmus
Edwin Arlington Robinson

When he protested, not too solemnly,
That for a world's achieving maintenance
The crust of overdone divinity
Lacked aliment, they called it recreance;
And when he chose through his own glass to scan
Sick Europe, and reduced, unyieldingly,
The monk within the cassock to the man
Within the monk, they called it heresy.

And when he made so perilously bold
As to be scattered forth in black and white,
Good fathers looked askance at him and rolled
Their inward eyes in anguish and affright;
There were some of them did shake at what was told,
And they shook best who knew that he was right.