A Man in our Town

by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1925)

We pitied him as one too much at ease
With Nemesis and impending indigence;
Also, as if by the way of recompense,
We sought him always in extremities;
And while ways more like ours had more to please
Our common code than his improvidence,
There lurked alive in our experience
His homely genius for emergencies

He was not one for men to marvel at,
And yet there was another neighborhood
When he was gone, and many a thrifty tear.
There was an increase in a man like that;
And though he be forgotten, it was good
For more than one of you that he was here.


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