Madison Julius Cawein

“ Look down on Earth nor sweep away the wrong!
Are these Thy teachings?—Where is then that pity,
Which bade the weary, suffering come to Thee?—
War takes its toll of life in field and City,
And Thou must see!—O Christianity!
And then the children!—Oh, Thou art another!
Not God! but Fiend, whom God has given release!—
Will prayer avail naught? tears of father, mother?
To give at last the weary world surcease
From butchery? ”

“ Put away the world's desire,
And sit down, a little while,
With our hearts, and light a fire:
Sing the songs that once we sung
In the days when we were young.
Haply they will bring again,
From the Lands of Song and Story,
To our sides the elfin train
Of the dreams we dreamed of glory,
That are one now with the crew
Of the deeds we did not do.
[Pg 53]
Here upon the road of Life
Let us rest us; take our pleasure:
Free from care and safe from strife,
Count again our only treasure—
Love, that helped us on our way,
Our companion night and day.
RECONCILIATION
Listen, dearest! ”

“ Workmen on every hand,
Sowing the seed of knowledge South and North,
More gracious now than ever, let her rise,
The splendor of a new dawn in her eyes;
Grave, youngest sister of that company,
That smiling wear
Laurel and pine
And wild magnolias in their flowing hair;
The sisters Academe,
With thoughts divine,
Standing with eyes a-dream,
Gazing beyond the world, into the sea,
Where lie the Islands of Infinity.
[Pg 91]
II
Now in these stormy days of stress and strain,
When Gospel seems in vain,
And Christianity a dream we've lost,
That once we made our boast ”

“ Enwrapt in dreams, I love to think of you
Wandering amid the meads of asphodel,
Holding high converse with the exalted few
Who sought and found below the elusive clue
To beauty, and in that diviner air
Bowing in worship still to its sweet spell.
Why sorrow, then, though fate unkindly lays
Upon our questioning hearts this burden sore,
And though through all our length of hastening days
He comes no more, no more!
Clinton Scollard. ”

“ How like a child the world! who, in this night
Of strife, beholds strange monsters threatening
And with black fear, having so little light,
Cries to its Father, God, for comforting.
And well for it, if, answering the call,
The Father hear and soothe its dread asleep!—
How many though, whom thoughts and dreams appall,
Must lie awake and in the darkness weep. ”

“ Has God forgot the world?"
[Pg 63]
THE LUST OF THE WORLD
Since Man first lifted up his eyes to hers
And saw her vampire beauty, which is lust,
All else is dust
Within the compass of the universe.
With heart of Jael and with face of Ruth
She sits upon the tomb of Time and quaffs
Heart's blood and laughs
At all Life calls most noble and the truth.
The fire of conquest and the wine of dreams
Are in her veins; and in her eyes the lure
Of things unsure,
Urging the world forever to extremes. ”

“ I heard a Spirit singing as, beyond the morning winging,
Its radiant form went swinging like a star:
In its song prophetic voices mixed their sounds with trumpet-noises,
As when, loud, the World rejoices after war.
And it said:
I
Hear me! ”

“ A dash more of human import mixed into the beauty and melody of his poetry would rank him with Lowell and the other great lyrists of our elder choir."
Some of the new poems portray a high moral passion, potent with the belief of life beyond, where his delicacy of vision penetrates the shadow and seems to have sighted the shore that has given his soul greeting "somewhere yonder in a world uncharted."
Clear, sure, and strong is the vocal loveliness and inevitable word with which this poet endears the little forms of life in the field of Faery. ”

“ Works to some end through hearts that dreams illumine:
To you I pour this Cup of Dreams—a striver,
And dreamer too in this sad world,—unwitting
Of that you do, the help that still assureth,—
Lifts up the heart, struck down by that dark driver,
Despair, who, on Life's pack-horse—effort—sitting,
Rides down Ambition through whom Art endureth.
THRENODY IN MAY (In memory of Madison Cawein.) ”

“ Shaping the world to her desire: the three
Her counsellors constantly,
[Pg 80] Her architects, through whom her dreams come true,—
Her workmen, bringing forth,
With toil that shall not cease,
Mountains and plains and seas,
That make the Earth
The glory that it is:
And, one with these,
Such works of man as this,
This building, towering into the blue,
A beacon, round which like an ocean wide,
Circles and flows the restless human tide. ”

“ Clove-spicy pinks and phlox that fill the sense
With drowsy indolence;
And in the evening skies
Interior splendor, pregnant with surprise,
As if in some new wise
The full moon soon would rise.
Hung with the crimson aigrets of its seeds
The purple monkshood bleeds;
The dewy crickets chirr,
And everywhere are lights of lavender;
And scents of musk and myrrh
To guide the foot of her.
She passes like a misty glimmer on
To where the rose blooms wan,—
A twilight moth in flight,—
As in the west its streak of chrysolite
The dusk erases quite,
And ushers in the night. ”

“ An end of thought in something dark and sure!
Mandrake and hellebore, or poison pure!—
Some drug of death, wherein there are no dreams!—
No more, no more, with patience, to endure
The wrongs of life, the hate of men, it seems ”

“ Gargoyls of dreams that groaned in the Middle Ages—
Aspects of darkness and death and hollow eidolons,
Cruel, inhuman,
Wearing the faces and forms of all the wrongs of the world.
Barbarian hordes whose shapes make hideous
The cycles of error and crime:
Grendels of darkness,
Devouring the manhood of Nations:
Demogorgons of War and Misrule,
Blackening the world with blood and the lust of destruction. ”

“ Cawein does, and no other American minstrel has so unvarying a devotion to nature. And none other, perhaps, has so keen an eye, so sure a word for nature's magic of mood, her trick of color, her change of form. He is not so wild and far-flying as Bliss Carmen, nor so large and elemental as Joaquin Miller; but he is often as delicate and eerie as Aldrich, and sometimes as warm and rich as Keats in the April affluence of 'Endymion.'"
"Mr. Cawein's landscape is not the sea, nor the desert, nor the mountain, but the lovely inland levels of his Kentucky. His work is almost wholly objective. ”

“ Above a world that burns,
A raven in the skies,
And as it flies into a Death's-Head turns.
The wild trees writhe and twist
Their gaunt limbs, wrung with fear:
And now into my ear
A word seems hissed;
A message, filled with dread,
A dark, foreboding word,—
"Behold! we are the dead,
Who here on Earth lived only by the sword!"
[Pg 57]
THE IRON CRAGS
Upon the iron crags of War I heard his terrible daughters
In battle speak while at their feet,
In gulfs of human waters,
A voice, intoning, "Where is God?" ”

“ Each instrument confessing you its lord,
Within the deathless orchestra of Song.
Albeit at times your music may sound wrong
To our dulled senses, and its meaning barred
To Earth's slow understanding, never marred
Your message brave: clear, and of trumpet tongue.
Poet-revealer, who, both soon and late,
Within an age of doubt kept clean your faith,
Crying your cry of "With the world all's well!"
How shall we greet you from our low estate,
Keys in the keyboard that is life and death,
The organ whence we hear your music swell?
[Pg 81]
RILEY His Birthday, October the 7th, 1912 ”

“ Hear me!
I am the expression of the subconscious,
The utterance of the intellect,
The voice of mind,
That stands for civilization.
Out of my singing sprang, Minerva-like,
Full-armed and fearless,
Liberty,
Subduer of tyrants, who feed on the strength of Nations.
Out of my chanting arose,
As Aphrodite arose from the foam of the ocean,
The Dream of Spiritual Desire,
Mother of Knowledge,
Victor o'er Hate and Oppression,—
Ancient and elemental dæmons,
[Pg 86] Who, with Ignorance and Evil, their consorts,
Have ruled for eons of years.
III
Hear me! ”

“ But still it sits and dreams:
And round it seems
Some memory of the past, still young and fair,
Haunting each crumbling stair.
And suddenly one dimly sees,
Come through the trees,
A woman, like a wild moss-rose:
A man, who goes
Softly: and by the dial
They kiss a while:
Then drowsily the mists blow round them, wan,
And they, like ghosts, are gone. ”

“ And crown you for the dreams your pen made human:
For Orphant Annie and for Old Aunt Mary,
The Raggedty Man, who never will grow older,
And all the kindly folks from Griggsby's Station,
Immortal throngs, with Spirk and Wunk and Faery,
Who swarm behind you, peering o'er your shoulder,
Sharing with you the blessings of a Nation. ”

“ Again, yea, she shall stand
For what Truth means to Man
For science and for Art and all that can
Make life superior to the things that weight
The soul down, things of hate
Instead of love, for which the world was planned;
May she demand
[Pg 94] Faith and inspire it; Song to lead her way
Above the crags of Wrong
Into the broader day ”

“ When the final word is spoken it is fitting that it be by one of authority. William Dean Howells, in the pages of The North American Review, offers this tribute:
"I had read his poetry and loved it from the beginning, and in each successive expression of it, I had delighted in its expanding and maturing beauty. Between the earliest and the latest thing there may have been a hundred different things in the swan-like life of a singer ... ”

“ With shrapnel pipes he goes his monstrous ways;
And, screeching, plays
The hell-born music Havoc dances to;
And, following with his skeleton-headed crew
Of ravening Nights and Days,
Horror invades the blue. ”

“ He has the gift, in a measure, that I do not think surpassed in any poet, of touching some commonest thing in nature, and making it live, from the manifold associations in which we have our being, and glow thereafter with an indistinguishable beauty.... ”

“ With all the dreams that used to be.
[Pg 52]
ON THE ROAD
Let us bid the world good-by,
Now while sun and cloud's above us,
While we've nothing to deny,
Nothing but our selves to love us:
Let us fancy, I and you,
All the dreams we dreamed came true. ”

“ The brotherhood of rich and poor."
[Pg 60] * * * *
They pass, with weary eyes and hair,
Before the Christ upon the Cross—
The Nations, wailing of their loss,
And lifting faces of despair.
THE WANDERER
Between the death of day and birth of night,
By War's red light,
I met with one in trailing sorrows clad,
Whose features had
The look of Him who died to set men right.
Around him many horrors, like great worms,
Terrific forms,
Crawled, helmed like hippogriff and rosmarine,—
Gaunt and obscene,
Urged on to battle with a thousand arms. ”

“ He sought for "Song to lead her way above the crags of wrong," and he gave
"Such music as a bird
Gives of its soul when dying
Unconscious if it's heard!"
And so he went, singing, to his "Islands of Infinity."
Rose de Vaux-Royer.
This edition is called the Friendship Edition, as it carries in its significance a testimonial of love and admiration for the author, extended by those who wish his last collected poems preserved for futurity.
Acknowledgment is due W. D. Howells, The North American Review, The Macmillan Co., Clinton Scollard and Edwin Markham for their courtesy. ”

“ Written December 7th, 1914.
Rose de Vaux-Royer.
The spirit of Madison Cawein passed at midnight from this world of intimate beauty "To stand a handsbreadth nearer Heaven and what is God!"
[Pg 8]
MADISON CAWEIN (1865-1914)
The wind makes moan, the water runneth chill ”