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 Two Octaves by Edwin Arlington Robinson 
						I
 Not by the grief that stuns and overwhelms
 All outward recognition of revealed
 And righteous omnipresence are the days
 Of most of us affrighted and diseased,
 But rather by the common snarls of life
 That come to test us and to strengthen us
 In this the prentice-age of discontent,
 Rebelliousness, faint-heartedness, and shame.
 
 
 II
 
 When through hot fog the fulgid sun looks down
 Upon a stagnant earth where listless men
 Laboriously dawdle, curse, and sweat,
 Disqualified, unsatisfied, inert, --
 It seems to me somehow that God himself
 Scans with a close reproach what I have done,
 Counts with an unphrased patience my arrears,
 And fathoms my unprofitable thoughts.
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