Madison Julius Cawein

“ 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.
[Pg 36]
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. ”

“ When the weight of the apples breaks down the boughs,
And musk-melons split with sweet,
And the moon is a-bloom in the Heaven's house,
And summer has spent its heat—
It's—Oh, for the lane, the trysting lane,
And the deep-mooned night and her love again! ”

“ The sad rain drips from her hair and hood,
And her cry sobs by, like a ghost pursued,
"O, my children, come home!"
"O, my children, come home!"
[Pg 2] Where the trees are gaunt and the rocks are drear,
The owl and the fox crouch down in fear,
While wild through the wood her voice they hear,—
"O, my children, come home, come home!
O, my children, come home!"
Who is she who shudders by
When the boughs blow bare and the dead leaves fly? ”

“ Of weeds that bloom, whose sultry perfumes rise
Stifling the swooning skies.
IV From ragweed fallows, rye fields, heaped with sheaves,
From blistering rocks, no moss or lichens crust,
And from the road, where every hoof-stroke heaves
A cloud of burning dust,
The hotness quivers, making limp the leaves,
That loll like tongues of panting hounds. The heat
Is a wan wimple that the Summer weaves,
A veil, in which she wraps, as in a sheet,
The shriveling corn and wheat.
V Furious, incessant in the weeds and briers
The sawing weed-bugs sing ”

“ While 'neath the moon, with moon-white feet,
They go and, chill, a moon-soft music draw
From wan leaf-cricket flutes—the sweet,
Sad dirge of Autumn dying in the shaw.
[Pg 42]
RAIN IN THE WOODS
When on the leaves the rain persists,
And every gust brings showers down;
When all the woodland smokes with mists,
I take the old road out of town
Into the hills through which it twists.
I find the vale where catnip grows,
Where boneset blooms, with moisture bowed;
The vale through which the red creek flows,
Turbid with hill-washed clay, and loud
As some wild horn a hunter blows. ”

“ Against the moon seemed some crutch'd hag
Dragging a child away.
And in the vale a runnel,
That dripped from shelf to shelf,
Seemed, in the night, a woodland witch
Who muttered to herself.
Along the land a zephyr,
Whose breath was wild perfume,
That seemed a sorceress who wove
Sweet spells of beam and bloom.
He told a story to her,
A story young yet old—
And was it of the mystic things
Men's eyes shall ne'er behold? ”

“ That speaks to our souls some beautiful thought,
That was not created to help us, and heal
Our lives that are overwrought.
[Pg 53]
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. ”

“ She pours clear ooze from her heart's cool cruse,
Its crystal cruse that drips, drips, drips;
And all the day its diamond spray
Is heard to play from her finger-tips;
And the slight soft sound makes haunted ground
Of the woods around that the sunlight laces,
As she pours clear ooze from her heart's cool cruse,
Its dripping cruse that no man traces.
She swims and swims with glimmering limbs,
With lucid limbs that drip, drip, drip;
Where beechen boughs build a leafy house
For her form to drowse or her feet to trip ”

“ 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.
[Pg 29] Or, with a smile, through watery deeps
She leads the oaring turtle's legs;
Or guides the crimson fish, that swims and sleeps,
From pad to pad, from which the young frog leaps;
And to its nest's green eggs
The bird that pleads and begs. ”

“ Poor breasts! that God designed for love,
For baby lips to kiss and press!
That never felt, yet dreamed thereof,
The human touch, the child caress—
That lie like shriveled blooms above
The heart's long-perished happiness.
O withered body, Nature gave
For purposes of death and birth,
That never knew, and could but crave
Those things perhaps that make life worth—
Rest now, alas! within the grave,
Sad shell that served no end of Earth.
[Pg 60]
COMMUNICANTS
Who knows the things they dream, alas! ”

“ What I am sure of is that in 'Weeds by the Wall' he has more deeply charmed me with an art perfected from that I felt in 'Blooms of the Berry' ten or fifteen years since. Many little books of his have come (I hope not also gone) between the first and last, and none of them has failed to make me glad of his work; and now, again, I am finding the same impassioned moods in the same impassive presences. To my knowledge, no such nature poems have been written within the time since Mr. Cawein began to write as his are, or from such an intimacy with the 'various language' which nature speaks. ”

“ She whispering sleeps and drips, drips, drips;
Where moon and mist wreathe neck and wrist,
While, starry-whist, through the night she slips;
And the heavenly dream of her soul makes gleam
The falls that stream and the foam that races,
As wrapped in deeps of the wild she sleeps,
She dripping sleeps or starward gazes. ”

“ Half-sunk in sleep beneath the beechen boughs,
Where thin the wood-gnats ail.
From bloom to bloom the languid butterflies drowse;
The sleepy bees make hardly any sound;
The only things the sunrays can arouse,
It seems, are two black beetles rolling 'round
Upon the dusty ground.
III Within its channel glares the creek and shrinks,
Beneath whose rocks the furtive crawfish hides
In stagnant places, where the green frog blinks,
And water-spider glides.
[Pg 32] And water-spider glides.
Far hotter seems it for the bird that drinks,
The startled kingfisher that screams and flies ”

“ 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 ”

“ There are other good poems in the book, poems which would have made reputes in the eighteenth century, and which it would be a shame not to own good in the twentieth; but those which speak for 'The Cricket,' ' A Twilight Moth,' 'The Grasshopper,' 'The Tree-Toad,' 'The Screech Owl,' 'The Chipmunk,' 'Drouth,' 'Before the Rain,' and the like, are in a voice which interprets the very soul of what we call the inarticulate things, though they seem to have enunciated themselves so distinctly to this poet. ”

“ It is cheap to note his increasing control of his affluent imagery and the growing mastery that makes him so fine an artist. These things were to be expected from his early poems, but what makes one think he will go far and long, and outlive both praise and blame, is the blending of a sense of the Kentucky civilization in such a poem as 'Feud.'... ”

“ Praise is, in fact, a delicate business, and I, who am rather fond of dealing in it, never feel quite safe. Not only is it questionable at the moment, but the later behavior of the author is sometimes such that one is sorry not to have made it blame. ”

“ OTHER VOLUMES BY MADISON CAWEIN
THE GARDEN OF DREAMS
Printed on hand-made paper; bound in watered silk; only a few copies remaining; price, $1.25 (net)
WEEDS BY THE WALL
Tastefully bound in silk cloth; price, $1.25
Sent on receipt of price to any address by
JOHN P. MORTON & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, in the North American Review for January, 1902.
"One never praises an author for certain things without afterward doubting if they were the characteristic things, or whether just the reverse might not be said. ”

“ THE POET
EVENING ON THE FARM
THE BROOK
SUMMER NOONTIDE
HEAT
JULY
TO THE LOCUST
YOUNG SEPTEMBER
UNDER THE HUNTER'S MOON
RAIN IN THE WOODS
IN THE LANE
A FOREST IDYL
UNDER THE ROSE
IN AUTUMN
EPIPHANY
LIFE
NEVER
MEETING IN THE WOODS
A MAID WHO DIED OLD
COMMUNICANTS
THE DEAD DAY
KNIGHT-ERRANT
THE END OF SUMMER
LIGHT AND WIND
SUPERSTITION
UNCALLED
LOVE DESPISED
THE DEATH OF LOVE
GERALDINE, GERALDINE
ALLUREMENT
BLACK VESPER'S PAGEANTS.
A Voice on the Wind And Other Poems by Madison Cawein ”