Madison Julius Cawein

“ Blue-streaked and crystal as a summer's cloud;
White violets, milk-weed, scarlet Indian-pinks,
All fragile-scented and familiar as
Pink baby faces and blue infant eyes.
O fair suggestions of a life more fair!
Love's fragrant whispers of an untaught faith,
High habitations 'neath a godlier blue
[Pg 34] Beyond the sin of Earth, in heavens prepared—
What is it?—halcyon to utter calm,
Faith? such as wrinkled wisdom, doubting, has
Yearned for and sought in miser'd lore of worlds,
And vainly?—Love?—Oh, have I learned to live? ”

“ I smelt the roses; and the night
Outside was fog and frost.
What though I claimed her dying there!
God nor one angel understood
Nor cared, who from loved feet to hair
Had changed to mist her blood.
Love, love had claimed us long, and long
Our hearts sang harp-strung, late and soon;
But God!—God jangles thus the song
And makes discord of tune.
What lily lilier than her face!
More virgin than her lips I kissed!
When morn like God, with gold and grace
Broke massed in mist! broke massed in mist!
[Pg 82] 2. ”

“ Sung for her, laughed for her, sorrowed and sighed for her,
Lived for her, hated and gladly had died for her!
See; she has written me thus! she has written me—
Sooner would dagger or serpent had smitten me!
Would they had shrivelled or ever they'd read of it!
Eyes, that are wide to the bitterest dread of it—
What have I said to her, what have I said!
What shall I make of it, I, who am trembling
Fearful of loss?—Oh, enamored, dissembling
Flame!—of the candle that burning, but guttering,
Flatters the moth that comes circling and fluttering
Out of the summer night ”

“ Our skies of a nearer blue,
A blue from which one borrows
A faith that helps one die—
O Mother, sweet Mother of Sorrows,
None needs such more than I!
[Pg 117] We lived, we loved unwedded—
Love's sin and its shame that slays!—
No ill of the year we dreaded,
No day of its coming days;
Its coming days, their many
Trials by morn and night,
And I know no land, not any,
Where love's lilies grow so white! ”

“ How had come a snowy bird
'Neath whose wing lay written pages
Of an unknown lover's word?
I forget; you may remember
How the earthquake shook our ships;
How our city, one huge ember,
Blazed within the thick eclipse;
When you found me—deep December
Sealed on icy eyes and lips.
I forget. No one may say
Pre-existences are true:
Here 's a flower dies to-day,
Resurrected blooms anew:
Death is dumb and Life is gray—
Who shall doubt what God can do! ”

“ Were not more white to have to kiss,
To love not more in tune.
And oft I think she is too true,
Too innocent for our day;
For in her eyes her soul looks new—
Two crowfoot-blossoms watchet-blue
Are not more soft than they. ”

“ Scrolls of the days blue-blotted,
Scrolls of the night star-dotted,
To love and us allotted
A world of woven dreams.
[Pg 68] When Autumn waited tired—
A fair-faced heretic—
Auto-de-fés Frost fired
In Winter's Bishopric;
Our loves, a song had started,
Grew with the song sad-hearted,
Sweet loves long-sworn were parted,
Though life for love was sick.
Now is the Winter waited
'Neath skies of frozen gold,
Or raining heavens hated
Of winds that curse and scold.—
Shall this be so: that never
Shall sunlight snowlight sever?
Forever and forever
The heart wait winter-cold? ”

“ Bud into beauty, with that blight born in him that must slay!
Just when we cherish him the most, and youthful, sunny pride
Sits on his curly front, he pines and dies ere I have died.
Whose fault?—not mine! but hers or his, that ancestor who gave
Escutcheon to our humble house—a death's-head and a grave.
[Pg 79] Beneath the pomp of those grim arms we live and may not move;
Nor faith, nor fame, nor wealth avail to hurl them down, nor love. ”

“ Careless in beauty of maturity;
The ripened roses 'round brown temples, she
Fulfils completion in a dreamy guess:
Now Time grants night the more and day the less;
The gray decides; and brown
Dim golds and reds in dulling greens express
Themselves and broaden as the year goes down.
Sadder the croft where, thrusting gray and high
Their balls of seeds, the hoary onions die,
Where, Falstaff-like, buff-bellied pumpkins lie:
Deeper each wilderness;
Sadder the blue of hills that lounge along
The lonesome west ”

“ In that thou look'st upon me—what thou art!—
As one fit for contempt, thou lack'st no part
Of my disdain?—Allah! I would not own
A dog of thine for friend no other known—
Of speech a tyrant, manners of an ass!"
And flung him, rags and rage, into the grass.
Provoked, astonished, wrinkled angrily,
Hissed Hisham, "Slave! thou know'st me not I see!"
[Pg 169] Calmly the youth, "Aye, verily I know,
O mannerless! thy tongue hath told me so,
Thy tongue commanding ere it spake me peace—
Soon art thou known, nor late may knowledge cease."
"O dog! I am thy Khalif! ”

“ The secret 'neath the striate scum o' the stream
The devil and the dream,
I, dropping gravels so the echo sob
Mocking and thin as music of a shade
In shades that wring from rocks a hollow woe,
Complaining phantoms of faint whispers rob.
There, up the valley where the lank grass leaps
Blades each a crooked kris,
The currents strike or miss
Dream melodies: No wide-belled mallow sleeps
Monandrous flowers oval as a kiss ”

“ These are the nights to kiss it
Times twice-a-twenty: they grow a-plenty
On lips that will not miss it.
4.
To dream where silence sleeps
A sorrow's sleep that sighs;
[Pg 48] Where all heaven's azure peeps
Blue from one wildflower's eyes
Where, in reflecting deeps,—
Of cloudier woods and skies,—
Another gray world lies.
Divining God from things
Humble as weeds and bees ”

“ Each several jewel glared a separate curse....
Well! dead men work us mischief from the grave.
Richer than all Castile and yet not dare
Drink but from cups of Roman murra, spar
Bowl-sprayed with fibrile gold! spar sensitive
Of poison! I, no slave, yet all a slave
To fear a dead fool's malice!—Still, how else!
Feasting within the music of my halls,
While perfumed beauty danced in sinuous robes,
Diaphanous, more silken than those famed
Of loomed Amorgos or of classic Kos,
Draining the unflawed murrhine, Xeres-brimmed,
Had I reeled poisoned, dying wolfsbane-slain! ”

“ That swoons moon-nectar and a serpent's hiss;
No tiger-lily, where the crayfish play,
Mirrors a savage face, a copper hue
Streaked with a crimson dew;
[Pg 51] No dragon-fly in endless error keeps
Sewing the pale-gold gown of day
With tangled stitches of a burning blue,—
Whose brilliant body but a needle is,
An azurn and incarnate ray:—
But here, where haunted with the shade,
The dull stream stales and dies,
Are beauties none or few,
Such sinister and new;
And one at widest noon-gaze shrinks afraid
Beneath the timid skies;
So, if you ask me why I answer this:—
You know not ”

“ And that your heart excuses all, and that you will not fret
Because you understand me now and never will forget.—
Now bring me roses pale and pure and tell me death's a lie,
—Late was it hard for me to live, now it is hard to die. ”

“ Buds that are speechless but bring
God-uttered God aphorism.
See how the synod is met
There of the planets to preach us—
Freed from the frost's oubliette,
Here how the flowers beseech us—
Were it not well to forget
Winter and night as they teach us?
[Pg 24] Dew-drop, a bud, and a star,
These—each a separate thought
Over man's logic how far!—
God to a unit hath wrought—
Love, making these what they are,
For without love they were naught.
Millions of stars ”

“ Ardent with word and with look and with kiss,
What though we know that their eyes are beseechful,
These were no joys to this.
Is it not well to have more of the spirit,
Living high futures this earthly must miss?
Less of the flesh with the past pining near it?—
Such is the joy of this. ”

“ What shall I make of it, what can I make!
Love, in thy everglades, moaning and motionless
Look, I have fallen; the evil is potionless:
[Pg 56] I, with no thought but the heavens that lock us in,
Set naked feet 'mid the cottonmouth, moccasin
Under wild-roses, the Cherokee, eying me:—
In the sweet blue with the egrets that, flying me,
Loosened like blooms from magnolias, rose slenderly
White and pale pink ”

“ Where fishers 'neath those cottonwoods
Last Spring encamped those ashes say
And charcoal boughs.—'T is long till buds!—
Here who in August misses May?
3.
He speaks, resting.
Here the shores are irised; grasses
Clump the water gray that glasses
Broken wood and deepened distance:
Far the musical persistence
Of a field-lark lingers low
In the west where tulips blow.
White before us flames one pointed
Star; and Day hath Night anointed
[Pg 30] King; from out her azure ewer
Pouring starry fire, truer
Than true gold. Star-crowned he stands
With the starlight in his hands. ”

“ Rolled in the dust each writhing, withered head.
And frowning westward, as the day grew late,
Four bleeding heads stared from the city gate
'Neath this inscription, for the passer-by,
"There is no virtue but in God the High." ”

“ Lives in the canvas; hers, some artist lost,
A duchess', haply. Her he worshipped; dared
Not tell he worshipped; from his window stared
Of Nuremburg one sunny morn when she
Passed paged to court. Her cold nobility
Loved, lived for like a purpose; seized and plied
A feverish brush—her face! despaired and died.
The narrow Judengasse; gables frown
Around a skinny usurer's, where brown
And dirty in a corner long it lay,
Heaped in a pile of riff-raff, such as—say,
Retables done in tempora and old
Panels by Wohlgemuth; stiff paintings cold
Of martyrs and apostles, names forgot ”

“ Who, questioned, mumbled in his bushy beard,
"To buy a wife withal"; whereat they laughed
As oafs when wisdom stumbles. Quoth a maid,
With orient midnight in her starry eyes,
And tropic music on her languid tongue,
"And what if I should wed with thee, O beard
[Pg 163] Grayer than my great-grandfather's, what then?"
"One kiss, no more, and, child, thou wert divorced,"
He; and the humor took them till the birds,
That listened in the spice-tree and the plane,
Sang gayly of the gray-beard and his kiss. ”

“ Fading dark-blue far away.
[Pg 67] PART IV. 1.
When in her cloudy chiton
Spring freed the donjoned rills,
And trumpeting, a Triton,
Wind-war was on the hills;
O'er ways, hope's buds bedizen,
Long ways the glory lies on,
Love spread us an horizon
Of gold beyond life's ills. ”

“ In the shadow of the rose
Snow-white, that blooms in her garden breezy,
We meet and no one knows.
To dream sweet dreams and kiss sweet kisses;
The world—it may live or die;
The world that forgets, the soul that misses
The life that has long gone by.
We speak old vows that have long been spoken,
And weep a long-gone woe,—
For you must know our hearts were broken
Hundreds of years ago.
[Pg 127] THE EPIC.
"To arms!" ”

“ Through iron-weeds and roses
And bronzing beech and oak,
Old porches it discloses,
Above the briars and roses
Fall's feeble sunbeams soak.
Neglected walks that tangle
The dodder-strangled grass;
Its chimney shows one angle
Heaped with dead leaves that spangle
The paths that round it pass.
[Pg 64] The early mists that bury
And hide them in its rooms,
From spider closets—very
Dim with old webs—will hurry
Out in the raining glooms.
They haunt each stair and basement;
They stand on hearth and porch ”

“ The bottle-blue o' the dragon-fly:—
O ho, O hi! Oh, well know I.
[Pg 18] An elf there is where the clover tips
A horn whence the summer leaks and drips,
Where lanthorns of mustard-flowers bloom,
In the dusk awaits the bee's dull boom;
Gay gold brocade from head to knee,
Who robs the caravan bumble-bee;
Big bags of honey bee-merchants pay
To the bandit elf of the Fairy way,—
O ho, O hey! I have heard them say.
Another ouphen the butterflies know,
Who paints their wings like the buds that blow ”

“ The nonsense of our God, the text absurd,
'One day each soul whatever shall be prompt
To bow before me and to give accompt.'"
Then wroth indeed was Hisham; hotly said,
"He braves us!—headsman, ho! his peevish head!
See; canst thou medicine its speech anew,
Doctor its multiplying words to few;
Divorce them well." So, where the Arab stood,
Bound him; made kneel upon the cloth of blood:
With curving sword the headsman leaned at pause,
[Pg 172] And, even as 'tis custom made of laws,
To the descendant of the Prophet quoth,
"O Khalif, shall I strike?" ”

“ And thief's prevail or prosper?—Pray the Lord!—
What! at your lives' cost?—my devout intent!
Even as 't is bidden let their necks be bent!
[Pg 153] Though words be pious, evil at the soul
Naught is the prayer!—So let their prayer be whole. ”

“ In our hearts to preach and sing
Week-day shade to Sabbath glisten.
9.
He, at parting.
Yes, to-morrow; when the morn,
Pentecost of flame, uncloses
Portals that the stars adorn,
Whence a golden presence throws his
Fiery swords and burning roses
At the wide wood's world of wall,
Spears of sparkle at each fall ”

“ And seized her hand and from her lips the kiss,
When from his age, behold, the dotage fell,
And from the man all palsied hoariness;
Victorious-eyed and amorous with youth,
A god in ardent capabilities
Resistless held her; and she, swooning, saw
Gloating the branded brow of Prince Behram.
[Pg 166] THE KHALIF AND THE ARAB. A Transcript. ”