The Poems of Madison Cawein, Volume 3 (of 5) / Nature poems

The Winter Wind, the wind of death,
Who knocked upon my door,
Now through the key-hole entereth,
Invisible and hoar:
He breathes around his icy breath
And treads the flickering floor.

I heard him, wandering in the night,
Tap at my window pane,
With ghostly fingers, snowy white,
I heard him tug in vain,
Until the shuddering candle-light
Did cringe with fear and strain.

The fire, awakened by his voice,
Leapt up with frantic arms,
Like some wild babe that greets, with noise,
Its father home who storms,
With rosy gestures that rejoice
And crimson kiss that warms.

Now in the hearth he sits and, drowned
Among the ashes, blows;
Or through the room goes stealing round
On cautious-stepping toes,
Deep-mantled in the drowsy sound
Of night that sleets and snows.

And oft, like some thin fairy-thing,
The stormy hush amid,
I hear his captive trebles ring
Beneath the kettle’s lid;
Or now a harp of elfland string
In some dark cranny hid.

Again I hear him, imp-like, whine,
Cramped in the gusty flue;
Or knotted in the resinous pine
Raise goblin cry and hue,
While through the smoke his eyeballs shine,
A sooty red and blue.

At last I hear him, nearing dawn,
Take up his roaring broom,
And sweep wild leaves from wood and lawn,
And from the heavens the gloom,
To show the gaunt world lying wan,
And morn’s cold rose a-bloom.

THE LEAF-CRICKET

I

Small twilight singer
Of dew and mist: thou ghost-gray, gossamer winger
Of dusk’s dim glimmer,
How cool thy note sounds; how thy wings of shimmer
Vibrate, soft-sighing,
Meseems, for Summer that is dead or dying.
I stand and listen,
And at thy song the garden-beds, that glisten
With rose and lily,
Seem touched with sadness; and the tuberose chilly,
Breathing around its cold and colorless breath,
Fills the pale evening with wan hints of death.

II

I see thee quaintly
Beneath the leaf; thy shell-shaped winglets faintly—
As thin as spangle
Of cobwebbed rain—held up at airy angle;
I hear thy tinkle,
Thy fairy notes, the silvery stillness sprinkle;
Investing wholly
The moonlight with divinest melancholy:
Until, in seeming,
I see the Spirit of the Summer dreaming
Amid her ripened orchards, apple-strewn,
Her great, grave eyes fixed on the harvest-moon.

III

As dewdrops beady,
As mist minute, thy notes ring low and reedy:
The vaguest vapor
Of melody, now near; now, like some taper
Of sound, far fading—
Thou will-o’-wisp of music aye evading.
Among the bowers,
The fog-washed stalks of Autumn’s weeds and flowers,
By hill and hollow,
I hear thy murmur and in vain I follow—
Thou jack-o’-lantern voice, thou elfin cry,
Thou dirge, that tellest Beauty she must die.

IV

And when the frantic
Wild winds of Autumn with the dead leaves antic;
And walnuts scatter
The mire of lanes; and dropping acorns patter
In grove and forest,
Like some frail grief, with the rude blast thou warrest,
Sending thy slender
Far cry against the gale, that, rough, untender,
Untouched of sorrow,
Sweeps thee aside, where, haply, I to-morrow
Shall find thee lying, tiny, cold and crushed,
Thy weak wings folded and thy music hushed.

THE OWLET

I

When dusk is drowned in drowsy dreams,
And slow the hues of sunset die;
When firefly and moth go by,
And in still streams the new-moon gleams,
A sickle in the sky:
Then from the hills there comes a cry,
The owlet’s cry:
A shivering voice that sobs and screams,
That, frightened, screams:—

“Who is it, who is it, who?
Who rides through the dusk and dew,
With a pair of horns,
As thin as thorns,
And face a bubble-blue?
Who, who, who!
Who is it, who is it, who?”

II

When night has dulled the lily’s white,
And opened wide the moonflower’s eyes,
When pale mists rise and veil the skies,
And round the height in whispering flight
The night wind sounds and sighs:
Then in the woods again it cries,
The owlet cries:
A shivering voice that calls in fright,
In maundering fright:—

“Who is it, who is it, who?
Who walks with a shuffling shoe,
’Mid the gusty trees,
With a face none sees,
And a form as ghostly too?
Who, who, who!
Who is it, who is it, who?”

III

When midnight leans a listening ear
And tinkles on her insect lutes;
When ’mid the roots the cricket flutes,
And marsh and mere, now far, now near,
A jack-o’-lantern foots:
Then o’er the pool again it hoots,
The owlet hoots:
A voice that shivers as with fear,
That cries in fear:—

“Who is it, who is it, who?
Who creeps with his glow-worm crew
Above the mire
With a corpse-light fire,
As only dead men do?
Who, who, who!
Who is it, who is it, who?”

THE POET

He stands above all worldly schism,
And, gazing over life’s abysm,
Beholds, within the starry range
Of heaven, laws of death and change,
That, through his soul’s prophetic prism,
Are turned to rainbows wild and strange.

Through nature is his hope made surer
Of that ideal, his allurer,
By whom his life is upward drawn
To mount pale pinnacles of dawn,
’Mid which all that is fairer, purer
Of love and lore it comes upon.

An alkahest, that makes gold metal
Of dross, his mind is—where one petal
Of one wild-rose will well outweigh
The piled-up facts of every-day—
Where commonplaces, there that settle,
Are changed to things of heavenly ray.

He climbs by steps of stars and flowers,
Companioned of the spirit Hours,
And sets his feet in pastures where
No merely mortal feet may fare;
And higher than the stars he towers
Though lowly as the flowers there.

His comrades are his own high fancies
And thoughts in which his soul romances;
And every part of heaven or earth
He visits, lo, assumes new worth;
And touched with loftier traits and trances
Reshines as with a lovelier birth.

He is the play, also the player;
The word that’s said, likewise the sayer;
And in the books of heart and head
There is no thing he has not read;
Of time and tears he is the weigher,
And mouthpiece ’twixt the quick and dead.

He dies: but, mounting ever higher,
Wings Phœnix-like from out his pyre
Above our mortal day and night,
Clothed on with sempiternal light;
And raimented in thought’s fine fire
Flames on in everlasting flight.

Unseen, yet seen, on heights of visions,
Above all praise and world derisions,
His spirit and his deathless brood
Of dreams fare on, a multitude,
While on the pillar of great missions
His name and place are granite-hewed.

SUMMER NOONTIDE

The slender snail clings to the leaf
Gray on its silvered underside;
And slowly, slowlier than the snail, with brief
Bright steps, whose ripening touch foretells the sheaf,
Her warm hands berry-dyed,
Comes down the tanned Noontide.

The pungent fragrance of the mint
And pennyroyal drench her gown,
That leaves long shreds of trumpet-blossom tint
Among the thorns, and everywhere the glint
Of gold and white and brown
Her flowery steps waft down.

The leaves, like hands with emerald veined,
Along her way try their wild best
To reach the jewel—whose hot hue was drained
From some rich rose that all the June contained—
The butterfly, soft pressed
Upon her sunny breast.

Her shawl, the lace-like elder bloom,
She hangs upon the hillside brake,
Smelling of warmth and of her breast’s perfume,
And, lying in the citron-colored gloom
Beside the lilied lake,
She stares the buds awake.

Or, with a smile, through watery deeps
She leads the oaring turtle’s legs;
Or guides the crimson fin, that swims and sleeps,
From pad to pad, from which the young frog leaps;
And to its nest’s green eggs
The reed-bird there that begs.

Then ’mid the fields of unmown hay
She shows the bees where sweets are found;
And points the butterflies, at airy play,
And dragon-flies, along the water-way,
Where honeyed flowers abound
For them to flicker round.

Or where ripe apples pelt with gold
Some barn—around which, coned with snow,
The wild-potato blooms—she mounts its old
Mossed roof, and through warped sides, the knots have holed,
Lets her long glances glow
Into the loft below.

To show the mud-wasp at its cell
Slenderly busy: swallows, too,
Packing against a beam their nest’s clay shell;
And crouching in the dark the owl as well
With all her downy crew
Of owlets gray of hue.

These are her joys; and until dusk
Lounging she walks where reapers reap,
From sultry raiment shaking scents of musk,
Rustling the corn within its silken husk,
And driving down heav’n’s deep
White herds of clouds like sheep.

TO THE LOCUST

Thou pulse of hotness, who, with reed-like breast,
Makest meridian music, long and loud,
Accentuating summer!—dost thy best
To make the sunbeams fiercer, and to crowd
With lonesomeness the long, close afternoon—
When Labor leans, swart-faced and beady-browed,
Upon his sultry scythe—thou tangible tune
Of heat, whose waves incessantly arise
Quivering and clear beneath the cloudless skies.

Thou singest, and upon his haggard hills
Drouth yawns and rubs his heavy eyes and wakes;
Brushes the hot hair from his face; and fills
The land with death as sullenly he takes
Downward his dusty way: ’midst woods and fields
At every pool his burning thirst he slakes;
No grove so deep, no bank so high it shields
A spring from him; no creek evades his eye;
He needs but look and they are withered dry.

Thou singest, and thy song is as a spell
Of somnolence to charm the land with sleep;
A thorn of sound that pierces dale and dell,
Diffusing slumber over vale and steep.
Sleepy the forest, nodding sleepy boughs;
Sleepy the pastures with their sleepy sheep;
Sleepy the creek where sleepily the cows
Stand knee-deep, and the very heaven seems
Sleepy and lost in undetermined dreams.

Art thou a rattle that Monotony,
Summer’s dull nurse, old sister of slow Time,
Shakes for Day’s peevish pleasure, who in glee
Takes its discordant music for sweet rhyme?
Or oboe that the Summer Noontide plays,
Sitting with Ripeness ’neath the orchard-tree,
Trying repeatedly the same shrill phrase,
Until the musky peach with weariness
Drops, and the hum of murmuring bees grows less?

JULY

Now ’tis the time when, tall,
The long blue torches of the bellflower gleam
Among the trees; and, by the wooded stream,
In many a fragrant ball,
Blooms of the button-bush fall.

Let us go forth and seek
Woods where the wild plums redden and the beech
Plumps its stout burrs; and, swelling, just in reach,
The pawpaw, emerald-sleek,
Ripens along the creek.

Now ’tis the time when ways
Of glimmering green flaunt white the giant plumes
Of the black-cohosh; and through bramble glooms,—
A blur of orange rays,—
The butterfly-blossoms blaze.

Let us go forth and hear
The spiral music that the locusts beat,
And that small spray of sound, so grassy sweet,
Dear to a country ear,
The cricket’s summer cheer.

Now golden celandine
Is hairy hung with silvery sacs of seeds,
And bugled o’er with freckled gold, like beads,
Beneath the fox-grape vine,
The jewel-weed’s blossoms shine.

Let us go forth and see
The dragon-and the butterfly, like gems,
Spangling the sunbeams; and the clover stems,
Weighed down with many a bee,
Nodding mellifluously.

Now morns are full of song;
The cat-bird and the red-bird and the jay
Upon the hilltops rouse the ruddy day,
Who, dewy, blithe, and strong,
Lures their wild wings along.

Now noons are full of dreams;
The clouds of heaven and the wandering breeze
Follow a vision; and the flowers and trees,
The hills and fields and streams,
Are lapped in mystic gleams.

The nights are full of love;
The stars and moon take up the golden tale
Of the sunk sun, and passionate and pale,
Mixing their fires above,
Grow eloquent thereof.

Such days are like a sigh
That beauty heaves from a full heart of bliss:
Such nights are like the sweetness of a kiss
On lips that half deny—
The warm lips of July.

EVENING ON THE FARM

From out the hills where twilight stands,
Above the shadowy pasture-lands,
With strained and strident cry,
Beneath pale skies that sunset bands,
The bull-bats fly.

A cloud hangs over, strange of shape,
And, colored like the half-ripe grape,
Seems some uneven stain
On heaven’s azure, thin as crape,
And blue as rain.

By ways, that sunset’s sardonyx
O’erflares, and gates the farm-boy clicks,
Through which the cattle came,
The mullein stalks seem giant wicks
Of downy flame.

From woods no glimmer enters in,
Above the streams that, wandering, win
From out the violet hills,
Those haunters of the dusk begin,
The whippoorwills.

Adown the dark the firefly marks
Its flight in golden-emerald sparks;
And, loosened from his chain,
The shaggy watch-dog bounds and barks,
And barks again.

Each breeze brings scents of hill-heaped hay;
And now an owlet, far away,
Cries twice or thrice, “T-o-o-w-h-o-o”;
And cool dim moths of mottled gray
Flit through the dew.

The silence sounds its frog-bassoon,
Where, on the woodland creek’s lagoon,
Pale as a ghostly girl
Lost ’mid the trees, looks down the moon
With face of pearl.

Within the shed where logs, late hewed,
Smell forest-sweet, and chips of wood
Make blurs of white and brown,
The brood-hen cuddles her warm brood
Of teetering down.

The clattering guineas in the tree
Din for a time; and quietly
The hen-house, near the fence,
Sleeps, save for some brief rivalry
Of cocks and hens.

A cow-bell tinkles by the rails,
Where, streaming white in foaming pails,
Milk makes an uddery sound;
While overhead the black bat trails
Around and round.

The night is still. The slow cows chew
A drowsy cud. The bird that flew
And sang is in its nest.
It is the time of falling dew,
Of dreams and rest.

The brown bees sleep; and round the walk,
The garden path, from stalk to stalk
The bungling beetle booms,
Where two soft shadows stand and talk
Among the blooms.

The stars are thick: the light is dead
That dyed the west: and Drowsyhead,
Tuning his cricket-pipe,
Nods, and some apple, round and red,
Drops over-ripe.

Now down the road, that shambles by,
A window, shining like an eye
Through climbing rose and gourd,
Shows where Toil sups and these things lie—
His heart and hoard.

UNDER THE HUNTER’S MOON

White from her chrysalis of cloud,
The moth-like moon swings upward through the night;
And all the bee-like stars that crowd
Heav’n’s hollow hive wane in her silvery light.

Along the distance folds of mist
Hang frost-pale, ridging all the dark with gray;
Tinting the trees with amethyst,
Touching with pearl and purple every spray.

All night the stealthy frost and fog
Conspire to slay the rich-robed weeds and flowers;
To strip the woods of wealth, and clog
With piled-up gold of leaves the creek that cowers.

I seem to see their Spirits stand,
Molded of moonlight, faint of form and face,
Now reaching high a chilly hand
To pluck some walnut from its spicy place:

Now with fine fingers, phantom-cold,
Splitting the wahoo’s pods of rose, and thin
The bittersweet’s globes of gold,
To show the coal-red berries packed within:

Now on frail threads of gossamer
Stringing slim pearls of moisture; necklacing
The flow’rs; and spreading cobweb fur,
Crystalled with stardew, over everything;

While ’neath the moon, with moon-white feet,
They wander and a moon-chill music draw
From thin leaf-cricket flutes—the sweet,
Dim dirge of Autumn dying in the shaw.

IN THE LANE

When the hornet hangs in the hollyhock,
And the brown bee drones i’ the rose,
And the west is a red-streaked four-o’-clock,
And summer is near its close—
It’s—Oh, for the gate and the locust lane
And dusk and dew and home again!

When the katydid sings and the cricket cries,
And ghosts of the mists ascend,
And the evening-star is a lamp i’ the skies,
And summer is near its end—
It’s—Oh, for the fence and the leafy lane,
And the twilight peace and the tryst again!

When the owlet hoots in the dogwood-tree,
That leans to the rippling Run,
And the wind is a wildwood melody,
And summer is almost done—
It’s—Oh, for the bridge and the bramble lane,
And the fragrant hush and her hands again!

When fields smell moist with the dewy hay,
And woods are cool and wan,
And a path for dreams is the Milky-way,
And summer is nearly gone—
It’s—Oh, for the rock and the woodland lane,
And the silence and stars and her lips again!

When the weight of the apples breaks down the limbs,
And musk-melons split with sweet,
And the moon’s broad boat in the heaven swims,
And summer has spent its heat—
It’s—Oh, for the lane, the trysting lane,
And the deep-mooned night and her love again!

EPIPHANY

There is nothing that eases my heart so much
As the wind that blows from the great green hills;
’Tis a hand of balsam whose healing touch
Unburdens my bosom of ills.

There is nothing that maketh my soul to rejoice
Like the sunset flaming without a flaw:
’Tis a burning bush whence God’s own voice
Addresses my spirit with awe.

There is nothing that hallows my mind, meseems,
Like the night with its moon and its starry slope:
’Tis a mystical lily whose golden gleams
Fulfill my being with hope.

There is nothing, no, nothing, we see and feel,
That speaks to our souls some beautiful thought,
That was not created to help us and heal
Our lives that are overwrought.

LIFE

I

Pessimist

There is never a thing we dream or do
But was dreamed and done in the ages gone;
Everything’s old; there is nothing that’s new,
And so it will be while the world goes on.

The thoughts we think have been thought before;
The deeds we do have long been done;
We pride ourselves on our love and lore
And both are as old as the moon and sun.

We strive and struggle and swink and sweat,
And the end for each is one and the same;
Time and the sun and the frost and wet
Will wear from its pillar the greatest name.

No answer comes for our prayer or curse,
No word replies though we shriek in air;
Ever the taciturn universe
Stretches unchanged for our curse or prayer.

With our mind’s small light in the dark we crawl,—
Glow-worm glimmers that creep about,—
Till the Power that made us, over us all
Poises His foot and treads us out.

Unasked He fashions us out of clay,
A little water, a little dust,
And then in our holes He thrusts us away,
With never a word, to rot and rust.

’Tis a sorry play with a sorry plot,
This life of hate and of lust and pain,
Where we play our parts and are soon forgot,
And all that we do is done in vain.

II

Optimist

There is never a dream but it shall come true,
And never a deed but was wrought by plan;
And life is filled with the strange and new,
And ever has been since the world began.

As mind develops and soul matures
These two shall parent Earth’s mightier acts;
Love is a fact, and ’tis love endures
‘Though the world make wreck of all other facts.

Through thought alone shall our age obtain
Above all ages gone before;
The tribes of sloth, of brawn, not brain,
Are the tribes that perish, are known no more.

Within ourselves is a voice of Awe,
And a hand that points to balanced Scales;
The one is Love, and the other, Law,
And their presence alone it is avails.

For every shadow about our way
There is a glory of moon and sun;
But the hope within us hath more of ray
Than the light of the sun and the moon made one.

Behind all being a purpose lies,
Undeviating as God hath willed;
And he alone it is who dies,
Who leaves that purpose unfulfilled.

Life is an epic the Master sings,
Whose theme is Man, and whose music, Soul,
Where each is a word in the Song of Things,
That shall roll on while the ages roll.

MEETING IN THE WOODS

Through ferns and moss the path wound to
A hollow where the touch-me-nots
Swung horns of honey filled with dew;
And where—like footprints—violets blue
And bluets made sweet sapphire blots,
’Twas there that she had passed I knew.

The grass, the very wilderness
On either side, breathed rapture of
Her passage: ’twas her hand or dress
That touched some tree—a slight caress—
That made the wood-birds sing above;
Her step that woke the flowers, I guess.

I hurried, till across my way,
Foam-footed, bounding through the wood,
A brook, like some wild child at play,
Went laughing loud its roundelay;
And there upon its bank she stood,
A sunbeam clad in forest gray.

And when she saw me, all her face
Bloomed like a wild-rose by the stream;
And to my breast a moment’s space
I gathered her; and all the place
Seemed conscious of some happy dream
Come true to add to Earth its grace:

Some union, that was Heav’n’s intent—
For which God made the world—the bliss,
The love, that raised her innocent
Young face to mine that, smiling, bent
And sealed her first words with a kiss—
As Love might close his testament.

ROSE AND RUE

Mamie Dean, ah, Mamie Dean,
Do you remember where
The willows used to screen
The water flowing fair?
The mill-stream’s banks of green
Where first our love begun,
When you were seventeen,
And I was twenty-one?

Mamie Dean, ah, Mamie Dean,
Do you remember how
From th’ old bridge we would lean—
The bridge that’s broken now—
To watch the minnows sheen
Through ripples of the Run,
When you were seventeen,
And I was twenty-one?

Mamie Dean, ah, Mamie Dean,
Do you remember, too,
The old beech-tree, between
Whose roots the windflowers grew?
Where oft we sat at E’en,
When stars were few or none,
When you were seventeen,
And I was twenty-one?

Mamie Dean, ah, Mamie Dean,
The bark is grown around
The names I cut therein,
And the true-love knot that bound;
The love-knot, clear and clean,
I carved when our love begun,
When you were seventeen,
And I was twenty-one.

Mamie Dean, ah, Mamie Dean,
The roof of the farm-house gray
Is fallen and mossy green;
Its rafters rot away:
The old path scarce is seen
Where oft our feet would run,
When you were seventeen,
And I was twenty-one.

Mamie Dean, ah, Mamie Dean,
Through each old tree and bough
The lone winds cry and keen—
The place is haunted now
With ghosts of what-has-been,
And dreams of love-long-done,
When you were seventeen,
And I was twenty-one.

Mamie Dean, ah, Mamie Dean,
There, in your world of wealth,
There, where you move a queen,
Broken in heart and health,
Does there ever rise a scene
Of days, your thought would shun,
When you were seventeen,
And I was twenty-one?

Mamie Dean, ah, Mamie Dean,
Here, ’mid the rose and rue,
Would God that your grave were green,
And I were lying, too!
Here on the hill, I mean,
Where oft we laughed in the sun,
When you were seventeen,
And I was twenty-one.

The Poems of Madison Cawein, Volume 3 (of 5) / Nature poems

About This Book

THE LEAF-CRICKET

I

II

III

IV

THE OWLET

I

II

III

THE POET

SUMMER NOONTIDE

TO THE LOCUST

JULY

EVENING ON THE FARM

UNDER THE HUNTER’S MOON

IN THE LANE

EPIPHANY

LIFE

I

Pessimist

II

Optimist

MEETING IN THE WOODS

ROSE AND RUE

A MAID WHO DIED OLD

The Poems of Madison Cawein, Volume 3 (of 5) / Nature poems

About This Book

I

II

III

IV

I

II

III

I Pessimist

II Optimist

I

Pessimist

II

Optimist