Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/473

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COLLECTED POEMS

For the children of the dark are more to name than are the wretched,Or the broken, or the weary, or the baffled, or the shamed:There are builders of new mansions in the Valley of the Shadow,And among them are the dying and the blinded and the maimed.

THE WANDERING JEW

I saw by looking in his eyesThat they remembered everything;And this was how I came to knowThat he was here, still wandering.For though the figure and the sceneWere never to be reconciled,I knew the man as I had knownHis image when I was a child.
With evidence at every turn,I should have held it safe to guessThat all the newness of New YorkHad nothing new in loneliness;Yet here was one who might be Noah,Or Nathan, or Abimelech,Or Lamech, out of ages lost,—Or, more than all, Melchizedek.
Assured that he was none of these,I gave them back their names again,To scan once more those endless eyesWhere all my questions ended then.I found in them what they revealedThat I shall not live to forget,

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