I would have rid the earth of him
Once, in my pride.
I never knew the worth of him
Until he died.

The speaker confesses that pride once made him wish another person gone—“rid the earth of him”—but death reveals the other’s true value. The short, hymn-like quatrain compresses a moral reversal: resentment and self-importance distort judgment while someone is alive, yet loss clarifies what was taken for granted. Robinson often dramatizes belated insight and the quiet tragedies of ordinary lives; here the poignancy comes from the irreversibility of the lesson. The final line lands as both elegy and self-indictment: the speaker’s recognition arrives only when it can no longer repair the relationship.