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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=381370" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Old Trails</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">(WASHINGTON SQUARE)</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>I met him, as one meets a ghost or two, <br>Between the gray Arch and the old Hotel. <br>“King Solomon was right, there’s nothing new,” <br>Said he. “Behold a ruin who meant well.” </div><div style="margin:10px 0">He led me down familiar steps again, <br>Appealingly, and set me in a chair. <br>“My dreams have all come true to other men,” <br>Said he; “God lives, however, and why care? </div><div style="margin:10px 0">“An hour among the ghosts will do no harm.” <br>He laughed, and something glad within me sank. <br>I may have eyed him with a faint alarm, <br>For now his laugh was lost in what he drank. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">“They chill things here with ice from hell,” he said; <br>“I might have known it.” And he made a face <br>That showed again how much of him was dead,<br>And how much was alive and out of place. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And out of reach. He knew as well as I <br>That all the words of wise men who are skilled <br>In using them are not much to defy <br>What comes when memory meets the unfulfilled.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What evil and infirm perversity <br>Had been at work with him to bring him back? <br>Never among the ghosts, assuredly, <br>Would he originate a new attack; </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Never among the ghosts, or anywhere,<br>Till what was dead of him was put away, <br>Would he attain to his offended share <br>Of honor among others of his day. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">“You ponder like an owl,” he said at last; <br>“You always did, and here you have a cause.<br>For I’m a confirmation of the past, <br>A vengeance, and a flowering of what was. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">“Sorry? Of course you are, though you compress, <br>With even your most impenetrable fears, <br>A placid and a proper consciousness <br>Of anxious angels over my arrears. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">“I see them there against me in a book <br>As large as hope, in ink that shines by night <br>Surely I see; but now I’d rather look <br>At you, and you are not a pleasant sight.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">“Forbear, forgive. Ten years are on my soul, <br>And on my conscience. I’ve an incubus: <br>My one distinction, and a parlous toll <br>To glory; but hope lives on clamorous. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">“’Twas hope, though heaven I grant you knows of what—<br>The kind that blinks and rises when it falls, <br>Whether it sees a reason why or not— <br>That heard Broadway’s hard-throated siren-calls; </div><div style="margin:10px 0">“’Twas hope that brought me through December storms, <br>To shores again where I’ll not have to be<br>A lonely man with only foreign worms <br>To cheer him in his last obscurity. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">“But what it was that hurried me down here <br>To be among the ghosts, I leave to you. <br>My thanks are yours, no less, for one thing clear: <br>Though you are silent, what you say is true. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">“There may have been the devil in my feet, <br>For down I blundered, like a fugitive, <br>To find the old room in Eleventh Street. <br>God save us!—I came here again to live.” </div><div style="margin:10px 0">We rose at that, and all the ghosts rose then, <br>And followed us unseen to his old room. <br>No longer a good place for living men <br>We found it, and we shivered in the gloom. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The goods he took away from there were few, <br>And soon we found ourselves outside once more, <br>Where now the lamps along the Avenue <br>Bloomed white for miles above an iron floor. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">“Now lead me to the newest of hotels,” <br>He said, “and let your spleen be undeceived: <br>This ruin is not myself, but some one else; <br>I haven’t failed; I’ve merely not achieved.” </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Whether he knew or not, he laughed and dined <br>With more of an immune regardlessness <br>Of pits before him and of sands behind <br>Than many a child at forty would confess; </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And after, when the bells in Boris rang <br>Their tumult at the Metropolitan, <br>He rocked himself, and I believe he sang. <br>“God lives,” he crooned aloud, “and I’m the man!” </div><div style="margin:10px 0">He was. And even though the creature spoiled <br>All prophecies, I cherish his acclaim. <br>Three weeks he fattened; and five years he toiled <br>In Yonkers,—and then sauntered into fame. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And he may go now to what streets he will— <br>Eleventh, or the last, and little care; <br>But he would find the old room very still <br>Of evenings, and the ghosts would all be there. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">I doubt if he goes after them; I doubt <br>If many of them ever come to him.<br>His memories are like lamps, and they go out; <br>Or if they burn, they flicker and are dim. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">A light of other gleams he has to-day <br>And adulations of applauding hosts; <br>A famous danger, but a safer way <br>Than growing old alone among the ghosts. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">But we may still be glad that we were wrong: <br>He fooled us, and we’d shrivel to deny it; <br>Though sometimes when old echoes ring too long, <br>I wish the bells in Boris would be quiet.</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=381370" data-title="Old Trails de Edwin Arlington Robinson" data-description="(WASHINGTON SQUARE)


I met him, as one meets a ghost or two, 
Between the gray Arch and the old Hotel. 
“King Solomon was right, there’s nothing new,” 
Said he. “Behold a ruin who meant well.” 

He led me down familiar steps again, 
App..."></div>
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