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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=381344" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>John Brown</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Though for your sake I would not have you now <br>So near to me tonight as now you are, <br>God knows how much a stranger to my heart <br>Was any cold word that I may have written; <br>And you, poor woman that I made my wife,<br>You have had more of loneliness, I fear, <br>Than I—though I have been the most alone, <br>Even when the most attended. So it was <br>God set the mark of his inscrutable <br>Necessity on one that was to grope,<br>And serve, and suffer, and withal be glad <br>For what was his, and is, and is to be, <br>When his old bones, that are a burden now, <br>Are saying what the man who carried them <br>Had not the power to say. Bones in a grave,<br>Cover them as they will with choking earth, <br>May shout the truth to men who put them there, <br>More than all orators. And so, my dear, <br>Since you have cheated wisdom for the sake <br>Of sorrow, let your sorrow be for you,<br>This last of nights before the last of days, <br>The lying ghost of what there is of me <br>That is the most alive. There is no death <br>For me in what they do. Their death it is <br>They should heed most when the sun comes again<br>To make them solemn. There are some I know <br>Whose eyes will hardly see their occupation, <br>For tears in them—and all for one old man; <br>For some of them will pity this old man, <br>Who took upon himself the work of God<br>Because he pitied millions. That will be <br>For them, I fancy, their compassionate <br>Best way of saying what is best in them <br>To say; for they can say no more than that, <br>And they can do no more than what the dawn<br>Of one more day shall give them light enough <br>To do. But there are many days to be, <br>And there are many men to give their blood, <br>As I gave mine for them. May they come soon! </div><div style="margin:10px 0">May they come soon, I say. And when they come,<br>May all that I have said unheard be heard, <br>Proving at last, or maybe not—no matter— <br>What sort of madness was the part of me <br>That made me strike, whether I found the mark <br>Or missed it. Meanwhile, I’ve a strange content,<br>A patience, and a vast indifference <br>To what men say of me and what men fear <br>To say. There was a work to be begun, <br>And when the Voice, that I have heard so long, <br>Announced as in a thousand silences<br>An end of preparation, I began <br>The coming work of death which is to be, <br>That life may be. There is no other way <br>Than the old way of war for a new land <br>That will not know itself and is tonight<br>A stranger to itself, and to the world <br>A more prodigious upstart among states <br>Than I was among men, and so shall be <br>Till they are told and told, and told again; <br>For men are children, waiting to be told,<br>And most of them are children all their lives. <br>The good God in his wisdom had them so, <br>That now and then a madman or a seer <br>May shake them out of their complacency <br>And shame them into deeds. The major file<br>See only what their fathers may have seen, <br>Or may have said they saw when they saw nothing. <br>I do not say it matters what they saw. <br>Now and again to some lone soul or other <br>God speaks, and there is hanging to be done,—<br>As once there was a burning of our bodies <br>Alive, albeit our souls were sorry fuel. <br>But now the fires are few, and we are poised <br>Accordingly, for the state’s benefit, <br>A few still minutes between heaven and earth.<br>The purpose is, when they have seen enough <br>Of what it is that they are not to see, <br>To pluck me as an unripe fruit of treason, <br>And then to fling me back to the same earth <br>Of which they are, as I suppose, the flower—<br>Not given to know the riper fruit that waits <br>For a more comprehensive harvesting. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yes, may they come, and soon. Again I say, <br>May they come soon!—before too many of them <br>Shall be the bloody cost of our defection.<br>When hell waits on the dawn of a new state, <br>Better it were that hell should not wait long,— <br>Or so it is I see it who should see <br>As far or farther into time tonight <br>Than they who talk and tremble for me now,<br>Or wish me to those everlasting fires <br>That are for me no fear. Too many fires <br>Have sought me out and seared me to the bone— <br>Thereby, for all I know, to temper me <br>For what was mine to do. If I did ill<br>What I did well, let men say I was mad; <br>Or let my name for ever be a question <br>That will not sleep in history. What men say <br>I was will cool no cannon, dull no sword, <br>Invalidate no truth. Meanwhile, I was;<br>And the long train is lighted that shall burn, <br>Though floods of wrath may drench it, and hot feet <br>May stamp it for a slight time into smoke <br>That shall blaze up again with growing speed, <br>Until at last a fiery crash will come<br>To cleanse and shake a wounded hemisphere, <br>And heal it of a long malignity <br>That angry time discredits and disowns. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Tonight there are men saying many things; <br>And some who see life in the last of me<br>Will answer first the coming call to death; <br>For death is what is coming, and then life. <br>I do not say again for the dull sake <br>Of speech what you have heard me say before, <br>But rather for the sake of all I am,<br>And all God made of me. A man to die <br>As I do must have done some other work <br>Than man’s alone. I was not after glory, <br>But there was glory with me, like a friend, <br>Throughout those crippling years when friends were few,<br>And fearful to be known by their own names <br>When mine was vilified for their approval. <br>Yet friends they are, and they did what was given <br>Their will to do; they could have done no more. <br>I was the one man mad enough, it seems,<br>To do my work; and now my work is over. <br>And you, my dear, are not to mourn for me, <br>Or for your sons, more than a soul should mourn <br>In Paradise, done with evil and with earth. <br>There is not much of earth in what remains<br>For you; and what there may be left of it <br>For your endurance you shall have at last <br>In peace, without the twinge of any fear <br>For my condition; for I shall be done <br>With plans and actions that have heretofore<br>Made your days long and your nights ominous <br>With darkness and the many distances <br>That were between us. When the silence comes, <br>I shall in faith be nearer to you then <br>Than I am now in fact. What you see now<br>Is only the outside of an old man, <br>Older than years have made him. Let him die, <br>And let him be a thing for little grief. <br>There was a time for service and he served; <br>And there is no more time for anything<br>But a short gratefulness to those who gave <br>Their scared allegiance to an enterprise <br>That has the name of treason—which will serve <br>As well as any other for the present. <br>There are some deeds of men that have no names,<br>And mine may like as not be one of them. <br>I am not looking far for names tonight. <br>The King of Glory was without a name <br>Until men gave Him one; yet there He was, <br>Before we found Him and affronted Him<br>With numerous ingenuities of evil, <br>Of which one, with His aid, is to be swept <br>And washed out of the world with fire and blood. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Once I believed it might have come to pass <br>With a small cost of blood; but I was dreaming—<br>Dreaming that I believed. The Voice I heard <br>When I left you behind me in the north,— <br>To wait there and to wonder and grow old <br>Of loneliness,—told only what was best, <br>And with a saving vagueness, I should know<br>Till I knew more. And had I known even then— <br>After grim years of search and suffering, <br>So many of them to end as they began— <br>After my sickening doubts and estimations <br>Of plans abandoned and of new plans vain—<br>After a weary delving everywhere <br>For men with every virtue but the Vision— <br>Could I have known, I say, before I left you <br>That summer morning, all there was to know— <br>Even unto the last consuming word<br>That would have blasted every mortal answer <br>As lightning would annihilate a leaf, <br>I might have trembled on that summer morning; <br>I might have wavered; and I might have failed. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And there are many among men today<br>To say of me that I had best have wavered. <br>So has it been, so shall it always be, <br>For those of us who give ourselves to die <br>Before we are so parcelled and approved <br>As to be slaughtered by authority.<br>We do not make so much of what they say <br>As they of what our folly says of us; <br>They give us hardly time enough for that, <br>And thereby we gain much by losing little. <br>Few are alive to-day with less to lose.<br>Than I who tell you this, or more to gain; <br>And whether I speak as one to be destroyed <br>For no good end outside his own destruction, <br>Time shall have more to say than men shall hear <br>Between now and the coming of that harvest<br>Which is to come. Before it comes, I go— <br>By the short road that mystery makes long <br>For man’s endurance of accomplishment. <br>I shall have more to say when I am dead.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Edwin+Arlington+Robinson">Edwin Arlington Robinson</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=381344" data-title="John Brown de Edwin Arlington Robinson" data-description="Though for your sake I would not have you now 
So near to me tonight as now you are, 
God knows how much a stranger to my heart 
Was any cold word that I may have written; 
And you, poor woman that I made my wife,
You have had more of loneliness, ..."></div>
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