Thomas Hood

The man who cloaked his bitterness within

This winding-sheet of puns and pleasantries,

God never gave to look with common eyes

Upon a world of anguish and of sin:

His brother was the branded man of Lynn;

And there are woven with his jollities

The nameless and eternal tragedies

That render hope and helplessness akin.

We laugh, and crown him; bu. anon we feel

A still chord sorrow-swept-a weird unrest;

And thin dim shadows home to midnight steal,

As if the very ghost of mirth were dead-

As if the joys of time to dreams had fled,

Or sailed away with Ines to the West.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Written before the age of 23.

From The Children of the Night, Richard G. Badger, 1897.

Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1905