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

Winds that cavern heaven and the clouds
And canyon with cerulean blue,—
Great rifts down which the stormy sunlight crowds
Like some bright seraph, who,
Mailed in intensity of silver mail,
Flashes his splendor over hill and vale,—
Now tramp, tremendous, the loud forest through:
Or now, like mighty runners in a race,
That swing, long pace to pace,
Sweep round the hills, fresh as, at dawn’s first start,
They swept, dew-dripping, from
The crystal-crimson ruby of her heart,
Shouting the dim world dumb.
And with their passage the gray and green
Of the earth’s washed clean;
And the cleansing breath of their might is wings
And warm aroma we know as Spring’s,
And sap and strength to her bourgeonings.

II

My brow I bare
To the cool, clean air,
That blows from the crests of the clouds that roll,
Pearl-piled and berged as floes of Northern Seas,
Banked gray and thunder-low
Big in the heaven’s peace;
Clouds, borne from nowhere that we know,
With nowhere for their goal;
With here and there a silvery glow
Of sunlight chasming deeps of sombre snow,
Great gulfs that overflow
With sky, a sapphire-blue,
Or opal, sapphire-kissed,
Wide-welled and deep and swiftly rifting through
Stratas of streaming mist;—
Each opening like a pool,
Serene, cerule,
Set round with crag-like clouds ’mid which its eye gleams cool.

III

What blue is bluer than the bluebird’s blue!—
’T is as if heaven itself sat on its wings;
As if the sky in miniature it bore
The fields and forests through,
Bringing the very heaven to our door;
The daybreak of its back soft-wedded to
The sunset-auburn of its throat that sings.—
The dithyrambics of the wind and rain
Strive to, but can not, drown its strain:
Again, and yet again
I hear it where the maples tassel red,
And blossoms of the crab round out o’erhead,
And catkins make the willow-brake
A gossamer blur around the lake
That lately was a stream,
A little stream locked in its icy dream.

IV

Invisible crystals of aërial ring,
Against the wind I hear the bluebird fling
Its notes; and where the oak’s mauve leaves uncurl
I catch the skyey glitter of its wing;
Its wing that lures me, like some magic charm,
Far in the woods
And shadowy solitudes:
And where the purple hills stretch under purple and pearl
Of clouds that sweep and swirl,
Its music seems to take material form;
A form that beckons with cerulean arm
And bids me see and follow,
Where, in the violet hollow,
There at the wood’s far turn,
On starry moss and fern,
She shimmers, glimmering like a rainbowed shower,
The Spirit of Spring,
Diaphanous-limbed, who stands
With honeysuckle hands
Sowing the earth with many a firstling flower,
Footed with fragrance of their blossoming,
And clad in heaven as is the bluebird’s wing.

V

The tumult and the booming of the trees,
Shaken with shoutings of the winds of March—
No mightier music have I heard than these,—
The rocking and the rushing of the trees,
The organ-thunder of the forest’s arch.
And in the wind their columned trunks become,
Each one, a mighty pendulum,
Swayed to and fro as if in time
To some vast song, some roaring rhyme,
Wind-shouted from sonorous hill to hill.
The woods are never still:
The dead leaves frenzy by,
Innumerable and frantic as the dance
That whirled its madness once beneath the sky
In ancient Greece,—like withered Corybants:
And I am caught and carried with their rush,
Their countless panic—borne away,
A brother to the wind, through the deep gray
Of the old beech-wood, where the wild March-day
Sits dreaming, filling all the boisterous hush
With murmurous laughter and swift smiles of sun;
Conspiring in its heart and plotting how
To load with leaves and blossoms every bough,
And whispering to itself, “Now Spring’s begun!
And soon her flowers shall golden through these leaves!—
Away, ye sightless things and sere!
Make room for that which shall appear!
The glory and the gladness of the year;
The loveliness my eye alone perceives,—
Still hidden there beneath the covering leaves,—
My song shall waken!—flowers, that this floor
Of whispering woodland soon shall carpet o’er
For my sweet sisters’ feet to tread upon,
Months kinder than myself, the stern and strong,
Tempestuous-loving one,
Whose soul is full of wild, tumultuous song,
And whose rough hand now thrusts itself among
The dead leaves; groping for the flowers that lie
Huddled beneath, each like a sleep-closed eye:
Gold adder’s-tongue and pink
Oxalis; snow-pale bloodroot blooms;
May-apple hoods, that parasol the brink,
Screening their moons, of the slim woodland-stream:
And the wild iris; trillium,—white as stars,—
And bluebells, dream on dream:
With harsh hand groping in the glooms,
I grasp their slenderness and shake
Their lovely eyes awake,
Dispelling from their souls the sleep that mars;
With heart-disturbing jars
Clasping their forms, and with rude finger-tips,
Through the dark rain that drips
Lifting them shrinking to my stormy lips.

VI

“Already spicewood and the sassafras,
Like fragrant flames, begin
To tuft their boughs with topaz, ere they spin
Their beryl canopies—a glimmering mass,
Mist-blurred, above the deepening grass.
Already where the old beech stands
Clutching the lean soil as it were with hands
Taloned and twisted,—on its trunk a knot,
A huge excrescence, a great fungous clot,
Like some enormous and distorting wart,—
My eyes can see how, blot on beautiful blot
Of blue, the violets blur through
The musky and the loamy rot
Of leaf-pierced leaves; and, heaven in their hue,
A sunbeam at each blossom’s heart,
The little bluets, crew on azure crew,
Prepare their myriads for invasion too.

VII

“And in my soul I see how, soon, shall rise,—
Still hidden to men’s eyes,—
Dim as the wind that round them treads,—
Hosts of spring-beauties, streaked with rosy reds,
And pale anemones, whose airy heads,
As to some fairy rhyme,
All day shall nod in delicate time:
And now, even now, white peal on peal
Of pearly bells,—that in bare boughs conceal
Themselves,—like snowy music, chime on chime,
The huckleberries to my gaze reveal—
Clusters, that soon shall toss
Above this green-starred moss,
That, like an emerald fire, gleams across
This forest-side, and from its moist deeps lifts
Slim, wire-like stems of seed;
Or, lichen-colored, glows with many a bead
Of cup-like blossoms: carpets where, I read,
When through the night’s dark rifts
The moonlight’s glimpsing splendor sifts,
The immaterial forms
With moonbeam-beckoning arms,
Of Fable and Romance,—
Myths that are born of whispers of the wind
And foam of falling waters, music-twinned—
Shall lead the legendary dance;
The dance that never stops,
Of Earth’s wild beauty on the green hill-tops.”

VIII

The youth, the beauty and disdain
Of birth, death does not know,
Compel my heart with longing like to pain
When the spring breezes blow.
The fragrance and the heat
Of their soft breath, whose musk makes sweet
Each woodland way, each wild retreat,
Seem saying in my ear, “Hark, and behold!
Before a week be gone
This barren woodside and this leafless wold
A million flowers shall invade
With argent and azure, pearl and gold,—
Like rainbow fragments scattered of the dawn,—
Here making bright, here wan
Each foot of earth, each glen and glimmering glade,
Each rood of windy wood,
Where late gaunt Winter stood,
Shaggy with snow and howling at the sky;
Where even now the Springtime seems afraid
To whisper of the beauty she designs,
The flowery campaign that she now outlines
Within her soul; her heart’s conspiracy
To take the world with loveliness; defy
And then o’erwhelm the Death—that Winter throned
Amid the trees,—with love that she hath owned
Since God informed her from His very breath,
Giving her right triumphant over Death.
And, irresistible,
Her heart’s deep ecstasy shall swell,
Taking the form of flower, leaf, and blade,
Invading every dell,
And sweeping, surge on surge,
Around the world, like some exultant raid,
Even to the heaven’s verge.
Soon shall her legions storm
Death’s ramparts, planting Life’s fair standard there,
The banner which her beauty hath in care,
Beauty, that shall eventuate
With all the pomp and pageant and the state,
That are a part of power, and that wait
On majesty, to which it, too, is heir.”

IX

Already bluish pink and green
The bloodroot’s buds and leaves are seen
Clumped in dim cirques; one from the other
Hardly distinguished in the shadowy smother
Of last year’s leaves blown brown between.
And, piercing through the layers of dead leaves,
The searching eye perceives
The dog’s-tooth violet, pointed needle-keen,
Lifting its beak of mottled green;
While near it heaves
The May-apple its umbrous spike, a ball,—
Like to a round, green bean,
That folds its blossom,—topping its tight-closed parasol:
The clustered bluebell near
Hollows its azure ear,
Low-leaning to the earth as if to hear
The sound of its own growing and perfume
Flowing into its bloom:
And softly there
The twin-leaf’s stems prepare
Pale tapers of transparent white,
As if to light
The Spirit of Beauty through the wood’s green night.

X

Why does Nature love the number five?
Five-whorled leaves and five-tipped flowers?—
Haply the bee i’ the voluble rose,
Laboring aye to store its hive,
And humming away the long noon hours,
Haply it knows as it comes and goes:
Or haply the butterfly,
Or moth of pansy-dye,
Flitting from bloom to bloom
In the forest’s violet gloom,
It knows why:
Or the irised fly, to whom
Each bud, as it glitters near,
Lends eager and ardent ear.—
And, also, tell
Why Nature loves so well
To prank her flowers in gold and blue.
Haply the dew,
That lies so close to them the whole night through,
Hugged to each honeyed heart,
Perhaps the dew the secret could impart:
Or haply now the bluebird there that bears,
Glad, unawares,
God’s sapphire on its wings,
The lapis-lazuli
O’ the clean, clear sky,
The heav’n of which he sings,
Haply he, too, could tell me why:
Or the maple there that swings,
To the wind’s soft sigh,
Its winglets, crystal red,
A rainy ruby twinkling overhead:
Or haply now the wind, that breathes of rain
Amid the rosy boughs, it could explain:
And even now, in words of mystery,—
That haunt the heart of me,—
Low-whispered, dim and bland,
Tells me, but tells in vain,
And strives to make me see and understand,
Delaying where
The feldspar fire of the violet breaks,
And the starred myrtle aches
With heavenly blue; and the frail windflower shakes
Its trembling tresses in the opal air.

IN SOLITARY PLACES

I

The hurl and hurry of the winds of March,
That tore the ash and bowed the pine and larch,
And filled the night with rushings,—like the crew
Of the Wild Huntsman,—and the days with hue
And cry of storm, soft in the heaven’s porch
Have laid them down:—loud winds, that trampled through
The forests with enormous, scythe-like sweep,
And from the darkened deep,
The battlemented heavens, thunder-blue,
Rumbled the arch,
The rocking arch of all the booming oaks,
With stormy chariot-spokes:
Chariots, from which wild bugle-blasts they blew
In warlike challenge.... Now the windflower sweet
Misses the fury of their ruining feet,
The trumpet-thunder of resistless flight,
Crashing and vast, obliterating light;
Sweeping the skeleton madness down
Of last-year’s leaves; and, overhead,
Hurrying the giant foliage of night,
Gaunt clouds that streamed with tempest.
... Now each crown
Of ancient woods, that clamored with their tread,
The frenzy of their passage, stoops no more,
Hearing no more their clarion-command,
Their chariot-hurl and the wild whip in hand.
No more, no more,
The forests rock and roar
And tumult with their shoutings.
Hushed and still
Is the green-gleaming and the sunlit hill,
Along whose sides,
Flushing the dewy moss and rainy grass—
Beneath the topaz-tinted sassafras,
Pale, aromatic as some orient wine—
The violet fire of the bluet glides,
The amaranthine flame
Of sorrel and of bluebell runs;
And through the drabs and duns
Of rotting leaves, the moonéd celandine,
Line upon lovely line,
Deliberate, goldens into birth:
And, ruby and rose, the moccasin-flower hides:
Innumerable flowers, with which she writes her name,
April, upon the page,
The winter-withered parchment of old earth;
Her fragrant autograph, that gives it worth
And loveliness that take away its age.

II

Here where the woods are wet,
The blossoms of the dog’s-tooth violet
Seem meteors in a miniature firmament
Of wild-flowers, where, with rainy sound and scent
Of breeze and blossom, dim the April went:
Their tongue-like leaves of umber-mottled green,
So thickly seen,
Seem dropping words of gold,
Inaudible syllables of a magic old.
Beside them, near the wahoo-bush and haw,
Blooms the hepatica;
Its slender flowers upon swaying stems
Lifting chaste, solitary blooms,
Astral, and twilight-colored,—frail as gems
That star the diadems
Of elves and sylvans, piercing pale the glooms;—
Or like the wands, the torches of the fays,
That link lone, leafy ways
With slim, uncertain rays:—
(The faëry people, whom no eye may see,
Busy, so legend says,
With budding bough and leafing tree,
The blossom’s heart o’ honey and honey-sack o’ the bee,
And all dim thoughts and dreams,
That take the form of flowers, as it seems,
And haunt the banks of greenwood streams,
Showing in every line and curve,
Commensurate with our love, an intimacy,
A smiling confidence or sweet reserve.)

There, at that leafy turn,
Of trailered rocks, rise fronds of hart’s-tongue fern:
Fronds that my fancy names
Uncurling gleeds of emerald and gold,
Whose feathering flames
Were kindled in the musky mould,
And now, as stealthy as the graying morn,
Thorn upon woolly thorn,
Build up, and silently unfold
Faint, cool, green fires, that burn
Uneagerly, and spread around
An elfin light above the ground,
Like that green, rayless glow
A spirit, lamped with crystal, makes below
In dripping caves of labyrinthine moss,
Or grottoes of the weedy undertow.—
And in the underwoods, around them, toss
The white-hearts with their penciled leaves,
That, ’mid the shifting gleams and glooms,
The interchanging shine and shade,
Seem some soft garment made
By visionary hands, that none perceives;
Hands busy with invisible looms
Of woodland shine and shade; a shadowy light,
Whose figments interbraid,
Carpeting the woods with colors and perfumes.—
Or, are they fragments left in flight,
These flow’rs that scatter every glade
With windy, rippling white,
And breezy, fluttering blue,
Of her wild gown that shone upon my sight,
A moment, in the woods I wandered through?
April’s, who fled this way?
April, whom still I follow,
Whom still my dreams pursue;
Who leads me on by many a tangled clue
Of loveliness, until in some green hollow,
Born of her fragrance and her melody,
But lovelier than herself and happier, too,
Cradled in blossoms of the dogwood-tree,
My soul shall see,
White as a sunbeam in the heart of day,
The infant, May.

III

Up, up, my heart! and forth where none perceives!
’Twas this which that sweet lay meant
You heard in dreams. Come, let us take rich payment,
For every care that grieves,
From Nature’s prodigal purse. ’Twas this that May meant
By sending forth the wind which round our eaves
Whispered all night;—or was’t the spirit who weaves,
From gold and glaucous green of early leaves,
Spring’s regal raiment?—
Up, up, my heart, and forth where none perceives!

Come, let us forth, my heart, where none divines!
Into far woodland places,
Where we may meet the fair assembled races,
Beneath the guardian pines,
Of May’s first flowers.... Poppy-celandines,
And starry trilliums, bugled columbines,
With which her hair, her radiant hair she twines,
And loops and laces.—
Come, let us forth, my heart, where none divines!

Forth, forth, my heart, and let us find our dreams,
There, where they haunt each hollow!
Dreams luring us with oread feet to follow,
With flying feet of beams,
Fleeter and lighter than the fleetest swallow:
Dreams, holding us with dryad glooms and gleams,
With Naiad eyes, far stiller than still streams,
That have beheld and still reflect, it seems,
The god Apollo.—
Forth, forth, my heart, and let us find our dreams!

Out, out, my heart, the world is white with spring.
Long have our dreams been pleaders:
Now let them be our firm but gentle leaders.
Come, let us forth and sing
Among the amber-emerald-tufted cedars,
And balm-o’-Gileads, cotton-woods, a-swing
Like giant censers, that, from leaf-cusps fling
Balsams of gummy gold, bewildering
The winds their feeders.
Out, out, my heart, the world is white with spring.

Up, up, my heart, and all thy hope put on.
Array thyself in splendor.
Like some bright dragon-fly, some May-fly slender,
The irised lamels don
Of thy new armor; and, where burns the centre,
Refulgent, of the opening rose of dawn,
Spread thy wild wings, and, ere the hour be gone,
Bright as a blast from some bold clarion,
Thy Dream-world enter.—
Up, up, my heart, and all thy hope put on.

IV

And then I heard it singing,
The wind that touched my hair,
A song of wild expression,
A song that called in session
The wild-flowers sweetly swinging,
The wild-flowers lightly flinging
Their tresses to the air.
And first, beneath a bramble arch,
The bloodroot rose; each bloom a torch
Of hollow snow, within which, bright,
The calyx grottoed golden light.

Hepatica and bluet,
And gold corydalis,
Arose as to an aria;
Then wild-phlox and dentaria,
In rapture, ere they knew it,
Trooped forward, nodding to it,
Faint as a first star is.

And then a music,—to the ear
Inaudible,—I seemed to hear;
A symphony that seemed to rise
And speak in colors to the eyes.

I saw the Jacob’s-ladder
Ring violet peal on peal
Of perfume, azure-swinging;
The bluebell slimly ringing
Its purple chimes; and, gladder,
Green note on note, the madder
Bells of the Solomon’s-seal.

Now very near, now faintly lost,
I saw their fragrant music tossed;
Mixed dimly with white interludes
Of trilliums starring cool the woods.
Then choral, solitary,
I saw the celandine
Smite bright its golden cymbals,
The starwort shake its timbrels,
The whiteheart’s horns of Fairy,
With many a flourish airy,
Strike silvery into line.

And, lo, my soul they seemed to draw,
By chords of loveliness and awe
Into a Fairy world afar
Where all man’s dreams and longings are.

V

And then a spirit looked down at me
Out of the deeps of the opal morn:
Its eyes were blue as a sunlit sea,
And young with the joy of a star that has just been born:
And I seemed to hear, with my soul, the rose of its cool mouth say:—

“Long I lay, long I lay,
High on the Hills of the Break-of-Day,
Where ever the light is green and gray,
And the gleam of the moon is a silvery spray,
And the stars are glimmering bubbles.
Now from the Hills of the Break-of-Day
I come, I come, on a rainbow ray,
To laugh and sparkle, to leap and play,
And blow from the face of the world away,
Like mists, its griefs and troubles.”

VI

And now that the dawn is everywhere,
Let us take this path through this wild, green place,
Where the rattlesnake-weed shows its yellow face,
And the lichens cover the rocks with lace:
Where tannin-tinct is the woodland air,
Let us take this path through the oaks where, thin,
The low leaves whisper, “The day is fair”;
And waters murmur, “Come in, come in,
Where you can hark to our waterfalls,
And the wind of their foam can play with your hair,
And soothe away care.—
Come here, come here, where our water calls.”

Berry blossoms, that seem to flow
As the winds blow,
Blackberry blossoms swing and sway
To and fro
Along the way,
Like ocean spray on a breezy day,
Over the green of the grass as foam on the green of a bay,
When the world is white and green with the white and the green of May.

VII

The dewberries are blooming now;
The days are long, the nights are short;
Each haw-tree and each dogwood bough
Is bleached with bloom, and seems a part,—
Reflected palely on her brow,—
Of dreams that haunt the Year’s young heart.

But this will pass; and presently
The world forget the spring that was;
And underneath the wild-plum tree,
’Mid hornet hum and wild-bee’s buzz,
Summer, in dreamy reverie,
Will sit all warm and amorous.

Summer, with drowsy eyes and hair,
Who walks the orchard aisles between;
Whose hot touch tans the freckled pear,
And crimsons peach and nectarine;
And, in the vineyard everywhere,
Bubbles with blue the grape’s ripe green.

Where now the briers blossoming are,
Soon will the berries darkly glow;
Then Summer pass: and star on star,
Where now the grass is strewn below
With petals, soon, both near and far,
Will lie the obliterating snow.

VIII

But now the bluets blooming,
The bluets brightly blue,
O’er which the bees go booming,
Drunk with the honey-dew,
From wood-ways which they strew,
Make eyes of love at you....
O slender Quaker-ladies,
With eyes of heavenly hue,
Who, where the mossy shade is,
Hold quiet Quaker-meeting,
Now tell me, is it true
That these wild-bees are raiders?
Bold gold-galloonéd raiders?
Gold-belted ambuscaders?—
Or are they serenaders,
Your gold-hipped serenaders,
That, to your ears repeating
Old ballads, come to woo,
And win the hearts of you,
The golden hearts of you?

And here the bells of th’ huckleberries toss, so it seems, in time,
Delicate, tenderly white, thick by the wildwood way;
Clusters swinging, it seems, inaudible peals of rhyme,
Music visibly dropped from the virginal lips of the May,
Crystally dropped, so it seems, bar upon blossoming bar,
Pendent, pensively pale, star upon hollowed star.

IX

The star-flower now, that disks with gold
The woodland moss, the forest grass,
Already in a day is old,
Already doth its beauty pass;
Soon, undistinguished, with the mould
’Twill mingle and ’twill mix, alas.
The bluet, too, that spreads its skies,
Its little heavens, at our feet;
And crowfoot-bloom, that, with soft eyes
Of amber, now our eyes doth greet,
Shall fade and pass, and none surmise
How once they made the Maytime sweet.

X

But the crowfoot-bloom still trails its gold
Along the edges of the oak-wood old;
And there, where spreads the pond, still white are seen
The lilies islanded between
The pads’ round archipelagoes of green;
The jade-dark pads that pave
The water’s wrinkled wave;
In which the vireo and the sparrow lave
Their fluttered breasts and wings,
Preening their backs, with many twitterings,
With necks the moisture streaks;
Then dipping deep their beaks,
To which the beaded coolness clings,
They bend their mellow throats
And let the freshness trickle into notes.

And now you hear
The red-capped woodpecker rap near;
And now that acrobat,
The yellow-breasted chat,
Calls high and clear,
Chuckling his grotesque music from
Some bough that he hath clomb.
And now, and now,
Upon another bough,
Hark how the honey-throated thrush
Scatters the forest’s listening hush
With notes of limpid harmony,
Taking the woods with witchery—
Or is ’t a spirit, none can see.
Hid in the top of some old tree,
Who, in his house of leaves, of haunted green,
Keeps trying, silver-sweet, his sunbeam flute serene?

XI

And then as I listened I seemed to see,
Out of the sunset’s ruin of gold,
A presence, a spirit, look down at me,
With eyes that were grave with the grief of a world grown old;
And I seemed to hear, with my soul, the flame of its sad mouth sigh:

“Now good-by, now good-by.
Down to the Caves of the Night go I;
Where a shadowy couch of the purple sky,
That the moon and the starlight curtain high,
Is spread for my joy and sorrow:
Down to the Caves of the Night go I,
Where side by side with mystery
And all the Yesterdays I’ll lie;
And where from my body, before I die,
Will be born the young To-morrow.”

XII

And here where the dusk steals on, you see,
Violet-mantled, from tree to tree,
The milkwort’s spike of lavender hue,—
Of rosy blue,—
Tipped by the weight of a passing bee,—
Nods like a goblin night-cap, slim, sedate,
That night shall tassel with the dew,
Beneath a canopy of rose and rue.
And as the purple state
Of twilight crowds the sunset’s crimson gate,
Now one, now two,
Drifting the oaks’ dark vistas through,
The screech-owl’s cry of “Who, oh, who,
Who stays so late?”
Drops like a challenge down to you.
The silence deepens; it seems so still,
That, if you laid to the tree your ear,
You too might hear
Its great roots growing into the hill;
Or there on the twig of the oak-tree tall,
The gray-green egg in the gray-green gall
Split, and the little round worm and white,
That grows to a gnat in a summer night,
Uncurl in its nest as it dreams of flight.
In the heart of the weed that grows near by,—
If you laid your ear
To a leaflet near,—
You too might hear, if you, too, would try,
The little gray worm, that becomes a fly
A gray wood-fly, a rainbowed fly,
As it feels a yearning for wings within,
Minute of movement, steadily,—
As a leaf-bud pushes from forth a tree,—
Under the milk of its larval skin,
The outward pressure of wings begin.

Far off a vesper-sparrow lifts its song,
Lost in the woods that now are beryl-wan;
The path is drowned in dusk, is almost gone,
Where now a fox or rabbit steals along:
Dark is each vine-roofed hollow where, withdrawn,
The creek-frog sounds his guttural gong,
Like some squat dwarf or gnome,
Seated upon his temple’s oozy dome,
Summoning the faithful unto prayer,
Muezzin-like, the worshipers of the moon,
The insect people of the earth and air,
Who join him in his twilight tune.

Along the path, where the lizard hides,
An instant shadow, the spider glides;
The hairy spider, that haunts the way,
Crouching black by its earth-bored hole,
An insect ogre, that lairs with the mole,
Hungry, seeking its insect prey,
Fast to follow and swift to slay.—
And over your hands and over your face
The cobweb brushes its phantom lace:
And now, from many a stealthy place,
Woolly-winged and gossamer-gray,
The forest moths come fluttering,
Marked and mottled with lichen hues,
Seal-soft umbers and downy blues,
Dark as the bark to which they cling.

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

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