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Home  »  Collected Poems by Robinson, Edwin Arlington  »  20. The Garden

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935). Collected Poems. 1921.

II. The Children of the Night

20. The Garden

THERE is a fenceless garden overgrown

With buds and blossoms and all sorts of leaves;

And once, among the roses and the sheaves,

The Gardener and I were there alone.

He led me to the plot where I had thrown

The fennel of my days on wasted ground,

And in that riot of sad weeds I found

The fruitage of a life that was my own.

My life! Ah, yes, there was my life, indeed!

And there were all the lives of humankind;

And they were like a book that I could read,

Whose every leaf, miraculously signed,

Outrolled itself from Thought’s eternal seed.

Love-rooted in God’s garden of the mind.