Once there was a cabin here, and once there was a man; <br />And something happened here before my memory began. <br />Time has made the two of them the fuel of one flame <br />And all we have of them is now a legend and a name. <br /> <br />All I have to say is what an old man said to me, <br />And that would seem to be as much as there will ever be. <br />“Fifty years ago it was we found it where it sat.”— <br />And forty years ago it was old Archibald said that. <br /> <br />“An apple tree that’s yet alive saw something, I suppose, <br />Of what it was that happened there, and what no mortal knows. <br />Some one on the mountain heard far off a master shriek, <br />And then there was a light that showed the way for men to seek. <br /> <br />“We found it in the morning with an iron bar behind, <br />And there were chains around it; but no search could ever find, <br />Either in the ashes that were left, or anywhere, <br />A sign to tell of who or what had been with Stafford there. <br /> <br />“Stafford was a likely man with ideas of his own— <br />Though I could never like the kind that likes to live alone; <br />And when you met, you found his eyes were always on your shoes, <br />As if they did the talking when he asked you for the news. <br /> <br />“That’s all, my son. Were I to talk for half a hundred years <br />I’d never clear away from there the cloud that never clears. <br />We buried what was left of it,—the bar, too, and the chains; <br />And only for the apple tree there’s nothing that remains.” <br /> <br />Forty years ago it was I heard the old man say, <br />“That’s all, my son.”—And here again I find the place to-day, <br />Deserted and told only by the tree that knows the most, <br />And overgrown with golden-rod as if there were no ghost.<br /><br />Edwin Arlington Robinson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/stafford-s-cabin/
