VIII. Avon’s Harvest, Etc.   
3. Ben Trovato   
     
THE DEACON thought. “I know them,” he began,      
“And they are all you ever heard of them—      
Allurable to no sure theorem,      
The scorn or the humility of man.      
You say ‘Can I believe it?’—and I can;           5   
And I’m unwilling even to condemn      
The benefaction of a stratagem      
Like hers—and I’m a Presbyterian.      
   
“Though blind, with but a wandering hour to live,      
He felt the other woman in the fur          10   
That now the wife had on. Could she forgive      
All that? Apparently. Her rings were gone,      
Of course; and when he found that she had none,      
He smiled—as he had never smiled at her.”

VIII. Avon’s Harvest, Etc.   
4. The Tree in Pamela’s Garden   
     
PAMELA was too gentle to deceive      
Her roses. “Let the men stay where they are,”      
She said, “and if Apollo’s avatar      
Be one of them, I shall not have to grieve.”      
And so she made all Tilbury Town believe           5   
She sighed a little more for the North Star      
Than over men, and only in so far      
As she was in a garden was like Eve.      
   
Her neighbors—doing all that neighbors can      
To make romance of reticence meanwhile—          10   
Seeing that she had never loved a man,      
Wished Pamela had a cat, or a small bird,      
And only would have wondered at her smile      
Could they have seen that she had overheard.

VIII. Avon’s Harvest, Etc.   
5. Vain Gratuities   
     
NEVER was there a man much uglier      
In eyes of other women, or more grim:      
“The Lord has filled her chalice to the brim,      
So let us pray she’s a philosopher,”      
They said; and there was more they said of her—           5   
Deeming it, after twenty years with him,      
No wonder that she kept her figure slim      
And always made you think of lavender.      
   
But she, demure as ever, and as fair,      
Almost, as they remembered her before          10   
She found him, would have laughed had she been there;      
And all they said would have been heard no more      
Than foam that washes on an island shore      
Where there are none to listen or to care.

VIII. Avon’s Harvest, Etc.   
6. Job the Rejected   
     
THEY met, and overwhelming her distrust      
With penitence, he praised away her fear;      
They married, and Job gave him half a year      
To wreck the temple, as we knew he must.      
He fumbled hungrily to readjust           5   
A fallen altar, but the road was clear      
By which it was her will to disappear      
That evening when Job found him in the dust.      
   
Job would have deprecated such a way      
Of heaving fuel on a sacred fire,          10   
Yet even the while we saw it going out,      
Hardly was Job to find his hour to shout;      
And Job was not, so far as we could say,      
The confirmation of her soul’s desire.

VIII. Avon’s Harvest, Etc.   
7. Lost Anchors   
     
LIKE a dry fish flung inland far from shore,      
There lived a sailor, warped and ocean-browned,      
Who told of an old vessel, harbor-drowned      
And out of mind a century before,      
Where divers, on descending to explore           5   
A legend that had lived its way around      
The world of ships, in the dark hulk had found      
Anchors, which had been seized and seen no more.      
   
Improving a dry leisure to invest      
Their misadventure with a manifest          10   
Analogy that he may read who runs,      
The sailor made it old as ocean grass—      
Telling of much that once had come to pass      
With him, whose mother should have had no sons.

VIII. Avon’s Harvest, Etc.   
8. Recalled   
     
LONG after there were none of them alive      
About the place—where there is now no place      
But a walled hole where fruitless vines embrace      
Their parent skeletons that yet survive      
In evil thorns—none of us could arrive           5   
At a more cogent answer to their ways      
Than one old Isaac in his latter days      
Had humor or compassion to contrive.      
   
I mentioned them, and Isaac shook his head:      
“The Power that you call yours and I call mine          10   
Extinguished in the last of them a line      
That Satan would have disinherited.      
When we are done with all but the Divine,      
We die.” And there was no more to be said.

VIII. Avon’s Harvest, Etc.   
9. Modernities   
     
SMALL knowledge have we that by knowledge met      
May not some day be quaint as any told      
In almagest or chronicle of old,      
Whereat we smile because we are as yet      
The last—though not the last who may forget           5   
What cleavings and abrasions manifold      
Have marked an armor that was never scrolled      
Before for human glory and regret.      
   
With infinite unseen enemies in the way      
We have encountered the intangible,          10   
To vanquish where our fathers, who fought well,      
Scarce had assumed endurance for a day;      
Yet we shall have our darkness, even as they,      
And there shall be another tale to tell.

VIII. Avon’s Harvest, Etc.   
10. Afterthoughts   
     
WE parted where the old gas-lamp still burned      
Under the wayside maple and walked on,      
Into the dark, as we had always done;      
And I, no doubt, if he had not returned,      
Might yet be unaware that he had earned           5   
More than earth gives to many who have won      
More than it has to give when they are gone—      
As duly and indelibly I learned.      
   
The sum of all that he came back to say      
Was little then, and would be less today:          10   
With him there were no Delphic heights to climb,      
Yet his were somehow nearer the sublime.      
He spoke, and went again by the old way—      
Not knowing it would be for the last time.

VIII. Avon’s Harvest, Etc.   
11. Caput Mortuum   
     
NOT even if with a wizard force I might      
Have summoned whomsoever I would name,      
Should anyone else have come than he who came,      
Uncalled, to share with me my fire that night;      
For though I should have said that all was right,           5   
Or right enough, nothing had been the same      
As when I found him there before the flame,      
Always a welcome and a useful sight.      
   
Unfailing and exuberant all the time,      
Having no gold he paid with golden rhyme,          10   
Of older coinage than his old defeat,      
A debt that like himself was obsolete      
In Art’s long hazard, where no man may choose      
Whether he play to win or toil to lose.

VIII. Avon’s Harvest, Etc.   
12. Monadnock Through the Trees   
     
BEFORE there was in Egypt any sound      
Of those who reared a more prodigious means      
For the self-heavy sleep of kings and queens      
Than hitherto had mocked the most renowned,—      
Unvisioned here and waiting to be found,           5   
Alone, amid remote and older scenes,      
You loomed above ancestral evergreens      
Before there were the first of us around.      
   
And when the last of us, if we know how,      
See farther from ourselves than we do now,          10   
Assured with other sight than heretofore      
That we have done our mortal best and worst,—      
Your calm will be the same as when the first      
Assyrians went howling south to war.