Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/529

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COLLECTED POEMS

Would not have had him in another place,He fitted with an unfamiliar graceThe coffin where I could not see him thenAs I had seen him and appraised him whenI deemed him unessential to the race.
For there was more of him than what I saw.And there was on me more than the old aweThat is the common genius of the dead.I might as well have heard him: "Never mind;If some of us were not so far behind,The rest of us were not so far ahead."

THE RAT

As often as he let himself be seenWe pitied him, or scorned him, or deploredThe inscrutable profusion of the LordWho shaped as one of us a thing so mean—Who made him human when he might have beenA rat, and so been wholly in accordWith any other creature we abhorredAs always useless and not always clean.
Now he is hiding all alone somewhere,And in a final hole not ready then;For now he is among those over thereWho are not coming back to us again.And we who do the fiction of our shareSay less of rats and rather more of men.

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