Madison Julius Cawein

“ Each bee is drunken with the honied air:
And all the heaven is eloquent with blue.
The wet hay glitters, and the harvester
Tinkles his scythe,—as twinkling as the dew,—
That shall not spare
Blossom or brier in its sweeping path;
And, ere it cut one swath,
Rings them they die, and tells them to prepare.
What is the spice that haunts each glen and glade?
A Dryad’s lips, who slumbers in the shade?
A Faun, who lets the heavy ivy-wreath
Slip to his thigh as, reaching up, he pulls
The chestnut blossoms in whole bosomfuls? ”

“ UNDER THE HUNTER’S MOON
White from her chrysalis of cloud,
The moth-like moon swings upward through the night;
And all the bee-like stars that crowd
Heav’n’s hollow hive wane in her silvery light.
Along the distance folds of mist
Hang frost-pale, ridging all the dark with gray;
Tinting the trees with amethyst,
Touching with pearl and purple every spray.
All night the stealthy frost and fog
Conspire to slay the rich-robed weeds and flowers;
To strip the woods of wealth, and clog
With piled-up gold of leaves the creek that cowers. ”

“ I seem to walk like one deep in a trance
With old-world myths born of the mist and moon.
Lascivious eyes and mouths of sensual rose
Smile into mine: and breasts of luring light,
And tresses streaming golden to the night,
Persuade me onward where the forest glows.
And then it seems along the haunted hills
There falls a flutter as of beautiful feet,
As if tempestuous troops of Mænads meet
To drain deep bowls and shout and have their wills.
And then I feel her limbs will be revealed
Like some great snow-white moth among the trees ”

“ Or to the moon repeat what they have seen,
When Night upon their shoulders vast doth lean.
Come where the dew’s clear syllable
Slips from the rose;
And where the fireflies fill
The dark with golden music of their glows.
VII
Now while the dingles and the vine-roofed glens
Whisper their flowery tale
Unto the silence; and the lakes and fens
Unto the moonlight pale
Murmur their rapture, let us seek her out,
Her of the honey throat and peach-sweet pout,
Summer! and at her feet,
The love of old
Lay like a sheaf of wheat,
And of our hearts the purest gold of gold. ”

“ What words of mine can tell the spell
Of garden ways I know so well?—
A path that takes me, when the days
Of autumn wrap the hills in haze,
Beneath the pippin-pelting tree,
’Mid flitting butterfly and bee;
Unto a door where, fiery,
The creeper climbs; and, garnet-hued,
The cock’s-comb and the dahlia flare,
And in the door, where shades intrude,
Gleams bright a fair girl’s sunbeam hair.
IV
What words of mine can tell the spell
Of garden ways I know so well?—
A path that brings me through the frost
Of winter, when the moon is tossed
In clouds ”

“ You may mark the Naiad rise
From her pool’s reflected skies;
In her gaze the heaven that dreams,
Starred, in twilight-haunted streams,
Mixed with water’s grayer gleams.{375}
You may see the laurel’s girth,
Big with bloom, give fragrant birth
To the Oread whose hair,—
Musk and darkness, light and air,—
Fills the hush with wonder there.
You may mark the rocks divide,
And the Faun before you glide,
Piping on a magic reed,
Sowing many a music-seed,
From which bloom and mushroom bead. ”

“ Up and far up and over,—the heaven grew erubescent,
Vibrant with rose and with ruby from hands of the harpist Dawn,
Smiting symphonic fire on the firmament’s barbiton;
And the East was a priest who adored with offerings of gold and of gems,
And a wonderful carpet unrolled for the inaccessible hems
Of the glittering robes of her limbs; that, lily and amethyst,
Swept glorying on and on through temples of cloud and mist. ”

“ Low strips of mist, that mesh the moon
Above the foaming waterfall;
And mountains that God’s hand hath hewn,
And forests where the great winds call,—
Within the grasp of such as see
Are parts of a conspiracy;
To seize the soul with beauty; hold
The heart with love: and thus fulfill
Within ourselves the Age of Gold,
That never died, and never will,—
As long as one true nature feels
The wonders that the world reveals. ”

“ Furious, incessant in the weeds and briers
The sawing weed bugs sing: and, heat-begot,
The grasshoppers, so many strident wires,
Staccato stinging hot:
A lash of whirling sound that never tires,
The locust flails the noon, where harnessed Thirst,
Beside the road-spring, many a shod hoof mires,
Into the trough thrusts his hot head; immersed,
Round which cool bubbles burst.
VI
The sad, sweet voice of some wood-spirit who
Laments while watching a loved oak-tree die,
From the deep forest comes the wood-dove’s coo,
A long, lost, lonely cry.—
Oh, for a breeze! ”

“ The frail eidolons of all blossoms Spring,
Year after year, about the forest tossed,
The magic touch of the enchanter, Frost,
Back from the Heaven of the Flow’rs doth bring;
Each branch and bush in silence visiting
With phantom beauty of its blooms long lost:
Each dead weed bends, white-haunted of its ghost,
Each dead flower stands ghostly with blossoming.
This is the wonder-legend Nature tells
To the gray moon and mist a winter’s night ”

“ Architecture of the mist:
And the moon-dawn’s necromance
Touched the mist and made it glance
Terraced pearl and amethyst.
Then around us, sharp and brusque,
Night’s shrill insects strident strung
Fairy viols that buzzed and sung,
Pixy music of the dusk.
And we seemed to hear soft sighs,
And hushed steps of ghostly things,
Fluttered feet and rustled wings
All around us. Fireflies,
Gleaming in the tangled glade,
Seemed the eyes of warriors,
Stealing under watching stars
To some phantom ambuscade ”

“ Of the sunset and the moon’s up-coming,
Shall the storm, with boisterous hoof-beats, under
Thy dark roof dance, Faun-like, to the humming
Of the Pan-pipes of the rain and thunder.
Oft the Satyr-spirit, beauty-drunken,
Of the Spring called; and the music measure
Of thy sap made answer; and thy sunken{4}
Veins grew vehement with youth, whose pressure
Swelled thy gnarly muscles, winter-shrunken. ”

“ Slow-syllabled of weed and bloom.
But, in the night, at languid rest,—
When like a spirit’s naked breast
The moon slips from a silver mist,—
With star-bound brow, and star-wreathed wrist,
If you should see her rise and wave
You welcome—ah! what thing could save
You then? forevermore her slave!
{438}
MAY
The golden discs of the rattlesnake-weed,
That spangle the woods and dance—
No gleam of gold that the twilights hold
Is strong as their necromance:
For, under the oaks where the woodpaths lead,
The golden discs of the rattlesnake-weed
Are the May’s own utterance. ”

“ Her great, grave eyes fixed on the harvest-moon.
III
As dewdrops beady,
As mist minute, thy notes ring low and reedy:
The vaguest vapor
Of melody, now near; now, like some taper
Of sound, far fading—
Thou will-o’-wisp of music aye evading.
Among the bowers,
The fog-washed stalks of Autumn’s weeds and flowers,
By hill and hollow,
I hear thy murmur and in vain I follow—
Thou jack-o’-lantern voice, thou elfin cry,
Thou dirge, that tellest Beauty she must die. ”

“ And limbs—like mist the lightning’s flicker dyes.
The humped oaks huddle under iron skies;
The dry wind whirls the dead leaves everywhere;
White on the water falls a vulture-glare
Of moon, and black the circling raven flies.
Again the power of this thing hath laid
Compulsion on me: and I seem to hear
A sweet voice calling me beyond the gates
To longed-for love: I come: each forest glade
Seems reaching out white arms to draw me near—
Nearer and nearer to the death that waits. ”

“ THE BROKEN DROUTH
It seemed the listening forest held its breath
Before some vague and unapparent form
Of fear, approaching with the wings of death,
On the impending storm.
Above the hills, big, bellying clouds loomed, black
And ominous; yet silent as the blue
That pools calm heights of heaven, deepening back
’Twixt clouds of snowdrift hue.
Then instantly, as when a multitude
Shout riot and war through some tumultous town,
Innumerable voices swept the wood
As wild the wind rushed down.
And fierce and few, as when a strong man weeps,
Great rain-drops dashed the dust ”

“ A flashing humming-bird among the flowers.{72}
A moon, moth-white, that through far mists, like fleece,
Moves amber-girt into a bulk of black,
And, lost to sight, rims all the black with froth:—
A love that swept its moon, like some great moth,
Across the heaven of her soul’s young peace;
And, smoothly passing, in the clouds did cease
Of time, through which its burning light comes back—
A moon, moth-white, that moves through mists like fleece. ”

“ Life and Death
Of our own selves God makes a glass, wherein
Two shades are imaged, passing like a breath:
And one is Life, whose other name is Sin;
And one is Love, whose other name is Death.
VIII
Sorrow
Death takes her hand and leads her through the waste
Of her own soul, wherein she hears the voice
Of lost Love’s tears, and, famishing, can but taste
The dead-sea fruit of Life’s remembered joys. ”

“ Stars that shine through the evening’s streaks
Over the torrent that flashes and breaks,
Brighter the eyes of my love, my love!
Moon in a cloud, as white as snow,
Mist in the vale where the rivulet bounds,
Dropping from ledge to ledge below,
Turning to gold in the sunset’s glow,
Softer and sweeter her footstep sounds.
Sound o’ May winds in the blossoming trees,
Oh, not so sweet as her laugh that rings;
Song o’ wild birds on the morning breeze,
Birds and brooks and murmur o’ bees,
Sweeter her voice when she laughs or sings.{70}
The rose o’ my heart is she ”

“ And blossoms on which spurts of light
Fell laughing—like the lips one might
Feign once were Hebe’s, or a girl’s
That laughter lights with rows of pearls.
Long ferns, in murmuring masses heaped;
And mosses moist, in beryl steeped
And musk aromas of the wood
And silence of the solitude:
And everything that near her blew
The spring had showered thick with dew.—
Across the rambling fence she leaned,
Her fresh, round arms all white and bare;
Her artless beauty, bonnet-screened,
Simplicity from feet to hair.
A wood-thrush gurgled in a vine—
Ah! ’tis his step, ’tis he she hears ”