Not even if with a wizard force I might <br />Have summoned whomsoever I would name, <br />Should anyone else have come than he who came, <br />Uncalled, to share with me my fire that night; <br />For though I should have said that all was right, <br />Or right enough, nothing had been the same <br />As when I found him there before the flame, <br />Always a welcome and a useful sight. <br /> <br />Unfailing and exuberant all the time, <br />Having no gold he paid with golden rhyme, <br />Of older coinage than his old defeat, <br />A debt that like himself was obsolete <br />In Art’s long hazard, where no man may choose <br />Whether he play to win or toil to lose.<br /><br />Edwin Arlington Robinson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/caput-mortuum/
