‘Joy shivers in the corner’

“Aunt Karen in the Rocking Chair,’’ by Edvard Munch, 1883

Here where the wind is always north-north-east
And children learn to walk on frozen toes,
Wonder begets an envy of all those
Who boil elsewhere with such a lyric yeast
Of love that you will hear them at a feast
Where demons would appeal for some repose,
Still clamoring where the chalice overflows
And crying wildest who have drunk the least.

Passion is here a soilure of the wits,
We're told, and Love a cross for them to bear;
Joy shivers in the corner where she knits
And Conscience always has the rocking-chair,
Cheerful as when she tortured into fits
The first cat that was ever killed by Care.

‘‘New England,’’ by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), famed poet who grew up on the Maine Coast

Old High School (1870-1969) in Gardiner, Maine, which Robinson attended.