The Poems of Madison Cawein, Volume 5 (of 5) / Poems of meditation and of forest and field

You are weary of reading:
I am weary of song:
The one is misleading;
The other, o’er long:—
All Art’s overlong.

Ah, would it were ours
To leave them, and then,
’Mid the fields and the flowers,
Be children again,
Glad children again.

INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL

A thought, to lift me up to those
Sweet wildflowers of the pensive woods;
The lofty, lowly attitudes
Of bluet and of bramble-rose:
To lift me where my mind may reach
The lessons which their beauties teach.

A dream, to lead my spirit on
With sounds of fairy shawms and flutes,
And all mysterious attributes
Of skies of dusk and skies of dawn:
To lead me, like the wandering brooks,
Past all the knowledge of the books.

A song, to make my heart a guest
Of happiness whose soul is love;
One with the life that knoweth of
But song that turneth toil to rest:
To make me cousin to the birds,
Whose music needs not wisdom’s words.

I

Shall I forget, and yet behold
How Earth hath said its secret,—to
The violet’s appealing blue,—
Of fragrance; old as Earth is old,
The knowledge that is never told?

Shall I behold and yet forget,
The soft blue of the heaven fell,
Between the dusk and dawn, to tell
Its purpose, to the violet,
Of beauty none hath fathomed yet?

Between the Earth and Heav’n, above,
The wind goes singing all day long;
And he who listens to its song
May catch an instant’s meaning of
The end of life, the end of love.

II

The gods of Greece are mine once more!
The old philosophies again!
For I have drunk the hellebore
Of dreams, and dreams have made me sane—
The wine of dreams! that doth unfold
My other self,—’mid shadowy shrines
Of myths which marble held of old,
Part of the Age of Bronze or Gold,—
That lives, a pagan, ’mid the pines.

Dead myths, to whom such dreams belong!
O beautiful philosophies
Of Nature! crystallized in song
And marble, peopling lost seas,
Lost forests and the star-lost vast,
Grant me the childlike faith that clung.—
Through loveliness that could not last,—
To Heaven in the pagan past,
Calling for God with infant tongue!

III

Idea, god of Plato! one
With beauty, justice, truth and love:
Who, type by type, the world begun
From an ideal world above!
Reason, who into Nature wrought
Your real entities,—which are
Ideas,—giving to our star
Their beauty through reflected thought;

The reminiscences that flame,
Momental, through the mind of man,
Of things his memory can not name,
Lost things his knowledge can not scan,—
Hints of past periods are not these,
His soul hath lived since it had birth
In God?—Yea! who shall say that Earth
More ancient is than he who sees?

IV

Beside us, and yet far above,
She leads us to no base renown—
The Ideal, with her sun-white crown,
And starry raiment of her love:
She leads us by ascending ways
Of Nature to her purposed ends,
Who in the difficult, dark days
Of trial with her smile defends.

Beyond the years, that blindly grope,
To climb with her, from year to year,
To some exalted atmosphere,
Were more than earthly joy or hope!
Though in that atmosphere we find
Not her—her influence, pointing to
New elevations of the mind
By some superior avenue.

V

The climbing-cricket in the dusk
Moves wings of moony gossamer;
Its vague, vibrating note I hear
Among the boughs of dew and musk,
Whence, rustling with a mellow thud,
The ripe quince falls. Low, deep and clear,
The west is bound with burning blood.

The slanting bats beneath the moon,—
A dark disk edge with glittering white,—
Spin loops of intertangled night:
An owl wakes, hooting over soon,
Within the forest far away:
And now the heav’n fills, light by light,
And all the blood-red west grows gray.

I hear no sound of wind or wave;
No sob or song, except the slow
Leaf-cricket’s flute-soft tremolo,
Among wet walks grown gray and grave.—
In raiment mists of silver sear,
With strange, pale eyes thou comest, O
Thou Spirit of the Waning-Year!

VI

The hills are full of prophecies
And ancient voices of the dead;
Of hidden shapes that no man sees,
Pale, visionary presences,
That speak the things no tongue hath said,
No mind hath thought, no eye hath read.

The streams are full of oracles,
And momentary whisperings;
An immaterial beauty swells
Its breezy silver o’er the shells
With wordless speech that sings and sings
The real life of unreal things.

No indeterminable thought is theirs,
The stars’, the sunsets’ and the flowers’;
Whose inexpressible speech declares
Th’ immortal Beautiful, who shares
This mortal riddle which is ours,
Beyond the forward-flying hours.

VII

The hornet stings the garnet grape,
Whose hull splits with the honeyed heat;—
Fall hears the long loud locust beat
Its song out, where, a girl-like shape,
She watches, through the wine-press’ crust,
Sweet trickle of the purple must.

The bee clings to the scarlet peach,
That thrusts a downy cheek between
The leaves of golden gray and green;—
Fall walks where orchard branches reach
Abundance to her hands, or drop
Their ripeness down to make her stop.

The bitter-sweet and sassafras
Hang yellow pods and crimson-black
Along the rails, that ramble back
Among the corn where she must pass;
Where, on her hair, a golden haze,
Showers the pollen of the maize.

Not till ’mid sad, chill scents all day
The green leaf-cricket chirrs its tune,
And underneath the hunter’s-moon
The oxen plod through clinging clay,
Or when, beyond the dripping pane,
The night sets in with whirling rain:

Not till ripe walnuts rain their spice
Of frost-nipped nuts down, and the oak
Pelts with brown acorns, stroke on stroke,
The creek that slides through hints of ice;
And in the lane the wagon pulls,
Crunching, through thick-strewn hickory hulls:

Not till through frosty fogs, which hold
Wet mornings with their phantom night,
Like torches glimmering through the white,
The woods burn crimson blurs and gold,
And through the mist come muffled sounds
Of hunting-horns and baying hounds:

Shall I on hills, where looming pines
Against vermilion sunsets stand—
Black ruins in a blood-red land—
In wrecks of sumac and wild vines,
Go seek her, where she lies asleep,
Her dark, sad eyes too tired to weep.

VIII

It holds and beckons in the streams;
It lures and touches us in all
The flowers of the golden fall—
The mystic essence of our dreams:
A nymph blows bubbling music where
Faint water ripples down the rocks;
A faun goes dancing hoiden locks,
And piping a Pandean air,
Through trees the instant wind shakes bare.

Our dreams are never otherwise
Than real when they hold us so;
We in some future life shall know
Them parts of it and recognize
Them as ideal substance, whence
The actual is—(as flowers and trees,
From color sources no one sees,
Draw dyes, the substance of a sense)—
Material with intelligence.

IX

Once more I watch the hills take fire
With dawn; and, shaggy spine by spine,
Flush like dark tyrants o’er their wine,
Who grasp the sword and break the lyre,
And carve the world to their desire;
While, red as blocks where kingdoms bleed,
The rocks trail crimson vine and weed.

To walls of gold, Enchantment built,
Again my fancy bids me go—
Through woods, bewitched with fire, where blow
Wild horns of tournament and tilt—
A fairy-prince, whose spear hath spilt
No blood but in a shadow-world,
While at the real his gage is hurled.

What far, æolian echoes lead
My longing?—as a voice might wake
A lost child from deep sleep and take,
With music of a magic reed,
Him home where love will give him heed:—
What echoes, blown from lands that lie
Melodious ’neath no mortal sky?

X

The fire, to which the Magi prayed,
The Aztecs sacrificed and kneeled,
Whose ceremonies now are sealed,
Whose priests are dust, whose people weighed,
Since God permitted such, should man,—
All ignorant of heavenly ends,—
Despise the means, since Earth began,
God works by to perfect His plan,
Which through immediate forms ascends
Of Nature, lifting, race by race,
Man to the beauty of His face?
Through Nature only we arrive
At God: identical with truth,
By periods of repeated youth,
Through Nature must the Ages strive;
The Epochs, that must purify
Themselves through her experience,
Her knowledge, which each Age lays by
To clothe it better for the sky
In robes of new intelligence
Befitting life, that upwardly
Approaches ends which none can see.

XI

Within the world awake behold
A world asleep ... the wildwood shades!
With limbs of glimmering coolness lolled
Along the purple forest glades:—
Sleep in each unremembering face,
The sea-worn Greeks knew these of old,
And named “the lotus-eating race.”

Within the life asleep I mark
A life awake; a life intense,
That spurs the sap beneath the bark
With tender hints of violence,
The liquid germs of leaf and bud,
And in the ponderable dark
Fulfils the offices of blood.

O wiser than Thy works!—behind
Thy works,—who shall behold Thy place?
Beyond the suns whose beams burn blind
Before the glory of Thy face!—
Among the least of worlds, shall we
Presume to give to Thee, defined,
A place and personality!

XII

Across the hills, that roll and rise
Beneath the blue, adoring skies,
Maturing Beauty by the old,
Dark forest stands, as might a slave
Before a Sultan sitting grave,
Grim-gazing from a throne of gold.

Across the hills, that rise and fall,
I gaze with eyes grown spiritual,
And see the Spirit of the Dew
From out the morn, that stains the mist
With amber and with amethyst,
Blown, bubble-bright, along the blue.

What king such kingly pomp can show
As on the hills the afterglow?
Where ’mid red woods the maples sit,
Like scarlet-mantled sagamores,
Who, from their totemed wigwam doors,
Watch, through red fires, the ghost-dance flit.

At night, as comes the fox, shall come
The Spirit of the Frost, whose thumb
Shall squeeze the chestnut burs, and press
Each husk bare; whisper every flower
Such tales of death that in an hour
It dies of utter happiness.

Until the moon sets I shall walk,
And listen how the woodlands talk
Of bygone lovely nights and days:
My soul, made silent intimate
Of all their sorrow, soon and late
A portion of the autumn haze.

XIII

What revelations fill with song
The cycles? and to what belong
Life’s far convictions of the light?
Through which the spirit waxeth strong,
The darkling soul surmounts the night,
By builded rainbows, to some height
Near mountain stars of Truth and Right,
Beyond the vulture-wing of Wrong?—

To Nature! who adjusts the deeps
Of her soul’s needs to man’s; and keeps
Such grave response as grief shall hear
When on her heart it sinks and weeps;
For every gladness, clean and clear
Its glad reflection lying near—
The wild accord of hope and fear
Which in her inmost bosom sleeps.

XIV

The mallow, like an Elfland moon,
Along the stream gleams grottoed gold;
Its bell-shaped blossom seems to hold
All the lost beauty of last June.
September’s mist haunts, white and cold,
The windings of the forest stream,
As death might haunt a thought or dream.

And who with idle words hath stood,
With idle thoughts, and gazed into
The face of one he loved and knew,
Dying in all her womanhood?
No words, but silence, then will do,
No thoughts but help the heart to hear:
So seems it with the fading year.

XV

The snowy flutter of a hand
Seems beckoning in the morning mist,
And from the mist a jewelled wrist
Of dew now waves us a command:
And in the skies, behold! the Land
Of Far-away-beyond-the-dawn,
Where, crowned with roses wild and wan,
The Futures of the World speed on.

Along the eve a fiery arm
Now points us to the waning west,
And all the sorrow, that oppressed
Our hearts once, straight becomes a charm
Of beauty, whose dim spells transform
The Present to the Long-ago,
All grief to joy,—or seeming so,—
We see through thaumaturgic glow.

XVI

Pearl-lilac blent with pearly rose,
The dawn bloomed slowly out of dusk,—
As some huge cactus from its husk
Bursts vast a bloom whose chalice glows
A grotto of transmuted dyes;—
Such wild, auroral light as flows
On ice-peaks from unearthly skies.

Dove-purple shifting into shades
Of opal,—like the tints which dwell
With fire in the ocean-shell,—
The sunset flashed above the glades
Through skies of nacre and of flame;—
Such supernatural light as braids
Dim coral caves, that have no name.

XVII

Draw from thine eyes the veil that hides
Ideal visions; beckonings
Of loveliness, whose soul abides
Beneath the commonplace of things:
No brook within the woodland then
But shows its sparkling god to thee;
Upon the ancient hills no tree
Whose whispering spirit thou shalt not see,
Fairer than children born of men.
Refine thy flesh that never hears
The inner music of all things,—
The deaf flesh,—from thy spirit’s ears,
And list the vaster voice that sings
With pregnant lips unto the Earth:
Mornings, who hymn with gold the sky,
To which the eves with gold reply—
The everlasting heavens that cry
The visible psalms of death and birth.

XVIII

The flowers of the fall I seek:
The purple aster,—like a gauze
Of pearl,—beneath the nodding haws
Or making gay each tangled creek:
The hairy, small herb-Robert, lost,—
Yet seen,—among the weeds which crush
Or crowd it, with its bluish blush;
Its rough, low stalk stung red with frost.

Around the rail-fence, climbing up,
The nightshade hangs rich berries down,—
Clusters of cochineal,—that drown
The flowering bind-weed’s pendant cup:
And where the boggy bottom sets
Its burs as breastworks and as tents,
Like bivouacking regiments,
The cat-tails stack their bayonets.

From amaranth—in tree and flower—
To asphodel-in weed and bloom—
The season swings a magic loom
Of sun and mist from hour to hour:
In its wide warp it weaves the dyes
Of morning’s brilliant blue and gray;
And crimson through the weft of day
Flings the wild woof of evening skies.

XIX

What intimations made them wise,
The mournful pine, the mighty beech?
Some strange and esoteric speech—
(Communicated from the skies
In secret whispers)—that invokes
The boles that sleep within the seeds,
And out of narrow darkness leads
The vast assemblies of the oaks.

Within his knowledge, what one reads
The poems written by the flowers?
The sermons, past all speech that’s ours,
Preached in the gospel of the weeds?—
O eloquence of coloring!
O thoughts of syllabled perfume!
O beauty uttered into bloom!
Teach me your dreams so I may sing!

XX

What time the great lobelia fills
The wildwood with the blue of spring—
And asters, scattered o’er the hills,
Bloom, starry-sown, through everything—
My fancy takes me wandering,
My fancy, clothed in daffodils.

In lavender lights, which sleep among
The ferns, my heart is at a loss
To find the love that leads along
Down magic ways of tufted moss—
Now, like the brook, it calls across,
Now, like a bird, it lures with song.

It leads me to the land which lies
Within a world no man can see;
Wherein the Elfland cities rise,
Faint haunts of musk and melody;
That with the butterfly and bee
And congregated flowers are wise.

XXI

Upon the Earth what hints are rife,
Of life when change hath left us still!
When death within us doth fulfil
Its end, whose part is one with life!
What hints, which tell us not alone
Immortal is the spirit, for
Flesh too,—corruption can but mar,—
The incorruptible puts on.

The blood but fills a part that’s higher
Of color, and pervades all flowers;
The brain informs the twinkling hours
With dreams of resurrected fire;
The heart performs the function of
A fragrance; and the countenance
Lends new expression to, perchance,
The face of beauty that we love.

XXII

Oh, joy, to walk the way that goes
Through woods of sweet-gum and of beech!
Where, like a ruby left in reach,
The berry of the dogwood glows:
Or where the bristling hillsides mass,
’Twixt belts of tawny sassafras,
Brown shocks of corn in wigwam rows!

Where, in the hazy morning, runs
The stony branch that pools and drips,
The red-haws and the wild-rose hips
Are strewn like pebbles; and the sun’s
Own gold seems captured by the weeds;
To see, through scintillating seeds,
The hunters steal with glimmering guns!

Oh, joy, to go the path which lies
Through woodlands where the trees are tall!
Beneath the misty moon of fall,
Whose ghostly girdle prophesies
A morn wind-swept and gray with rain;
When, o’er the lonely, leafy lane,
The night-hawk, like a dead leaf, flies!

To stand within the dewy ring
Where pale death smites the boneset blooms,
And everlasting’s flowers, and plumes
Of mint, with aromatic wing!
And hear the creek,—whose sobbing seems
A wild man murmuring in his dreams,—
And insect violins that sing!
Or where the dim persimmon-tree
Rains on the path its frosty fruit,
And in the oak the owl doth hoot,
Beneath the moon and mist, to see
The outcast Year come,—Hagar-wise,—
With far-off, melancholy eyes,
And lips that thirst for sympathy!

XXIII

Along my mind flies suddenly
A wildwood thought that will not die,
That makes me brother to the bee,
And cousin to the butterfly:
A thought, such as gives perfume to
The blushes of the bramble-rose,
And, fixed in quivering crystal, glows
A captive in the prismed dew.

It leads the feet no certain way,
No frequent path of human feet:
Its wild eyes follow me all day,
All day I hear its wild heart beat:
And in the night it sings and sighs
The songs the winds and waters love;
Its wild heart lying tranced above,
And tranced the wildness of its eyes.

XXIV

With eyes that seem to ache with tears
I look beyond the twilight fields:
The stars swing down their shimmering shields,
And fill the phalanx of their spears.
I can not see, I only know
A flower dies beneath my feet;
The fragrance of its death is sweet
And bitter as my heart’s own woe.

With thoughts that find not what they seek
I question Earth and Heaven, and find
That they are dark and I am blind,
And in my blindness very weak.
I do not know, I only feel
Behind all death a purpose stands,
With hallowed and magnetic hands,
Beneficent and strong to heal.

XXV

These, too, shall tell me what my heart,
And what my soul desireth:—
The flowers, that bloom serene for death,
The stars, that know no mortal part.
One shall inspire my heart with acts
Of life so that the death responds;
One to the soul breathe higher facts
Of death that shall annul such bonds.

Sufficient for my love these terms,
Beyond my understanding’s scope:
I merely know all life must grope
Not downward from its darkling germs.
Sufficient for my faith is such:
That, in the narrow night that binds
The seed, its life shall feel in touch
With light above it seeks and finds.

XXVI

Beyond the violet-colored hill
The golden, deepening daffodil
Of dusk bloomed on heav’n’s window-sill:
And, drifting west, the crescent moon
Gleamed like a sword of Scanderoon
A khedive dropped on floors of gold;
Near which,—one loosened gem that rolled
Out of the jewelled scimitar,—
Glittered and shone the evening-star.

Behind the trees, where, darkly deep
As indigo, the shadows sleep,—
As if the Titan world would heap
A throne with purple for its god,
Whose pomp comes with vermilion shod—
The west, ’thwart which the wild-ducks fly,
Burns, richer than the orient dye
Phœnician vessels brought from Tyre,
Deep, murex-stained, with carmine fire.

The light dies down; the skies grow gray:
The sear, dark forests sound and sway:
The ashen rain-clouds roll this way.
The green grig in the withered weeds
Sings, and the wild snipe seeks the reeds.
With hurling winds,—that seem to wail
Like Demon Huntsmen,—dark with hail
And rain, which blot the cabin’s light,
Comes on the wild autumnal night.

XXVII

There is a rushing in the woods,
The autumn-haunted solitudes,
When night comes in with winds that sweep
The wild rain from the hills; and reap
The roaring harvest of the leaves
With unseen scythes Death stalks behind,
And Desolation, fierce and blind,
Heaping the storm’s tumultuous sheaves.
There is a sighing in the woods,
The hills of autumn solitudes,
When on the night, the winds have strewn
With crowding clouds, the stormy moon
Bursts like a herald shouting Cease!
Through darkness o’er a battlefield
Of Hell; the splendor of his shield
Inscribed with silence and with peace.

XXVIII

The storm,—that makes the sky its own,
And smites its spirit through Earth’s nerves,
And, like an instrument which serves
High purposes to us unknown
Of song that knows not that it sings,—
Itself is all majestic things
Imagination forms or feels;
Itself all wonders it reveals
To thought, which knows but semblances
Of such concealed realities.

The star, that flames through storm and crowds
An instant with its utterance
Of silence and serene romance,
And glides again into the clouds,
Shone for some present end; and filled
A moment’s need as Heaven willed:—
A thought, some dreamer labored for,
Immaculate as is a star;
A hope, some weary watcher read
Pale in the loved face of his dead.

XXIX

Towards evening, where the sweet-gum flung
Its thorny balls among the weeds,
And where the milkweed’s sleepy seeds,—
A fairy Feast of Lanterns,—swung;
The cricket tuned a plaintive lyre,
And o’er the hills the sunset hung
A purple parchment scrawled with fire.

From silver-blue to amethyst
The shadows broadened in the vale;
And, belt by belt, the pearly pale
Aladdin fabric of the mist
Stretched its vague exhalation far;
A jewel on an Afrit’s wrist,
One star gemmed sunset’s cinnabar.

Then night drew near, as when, alone,
The heart and soul grow intimate;
And on the hills the twilight sate
With shadows, whose wild robes were sown
With dreams and whispers—dreams, that led
The heart once with love’s monotone,
And whispers of the living dead.

XXX

Of life and of eternity
These are the dreams that came to me:
The one:—A whitened whirl of sea;
A gallows beetling through the rains,
And, tossing in its rusty chains,
Carrion upon the gallows-tree:
Gaunt ravens swarm above and tear
Long strips from shrivelled skin and hair:
A ship hurls pounding on the rocks:
Wild minute-guns boom through the spume
And crashing surf: out of the gloom
The strangled dead leers down and mocks.

An incorporeal solitude,
Which darkness out of darkness hewed,
The other dream: Enormous deeps
Of naught, where ancient Silence sleeps,
The eldest of Heav’n’s Titan brood:—
In unilluminated night,
Vast and insufferable white,
A summit soars: its light, which dyes
Not darkness, of itself is born:
Around its splendor, as in scorn,
Night’s dark, defiant chaos lies.