Madison Julius Cawein

“ With wrecks of thunder; and the moon doth give
The clouds wild witchery,—as in a room,
Behind the sorrowful arras, still may live
The pallid secret of the haunted gloom.—
Do you remember, now the night draws down?
Do you remember, now it comes to pass
Your form is bowed as is the wind-swept grass?
And death hath won from you that confidence
Denied to life? now your sick soul rebels
Against your pride with tragic eloquence,
That self-crowned demon of the heart’s fierce hells.—
Do you remember, now it comes to pass?
Yea, you remember! Bid your soul be still! ”

“ With points of mist; and, orbing, dim
With fog the sunflower’s ruined rim.—
With fog, through which the moon at night
Would glimmer like a spectre sail;
Or, sullenly, a blur of light,
Like some great glow-worm, dimly trail;
’Neath which she’d hear, wrapped deep in white,
The far sea moaning on its shale:
While in the garden, pacing slow,
And listening to its surge and flow,
She’d seem to hear her own heart’s woe. ”

“ The soul of love is harmony: as such
All melodies, that with wide pinions beat
Against the heart’s red gateway to the soul,—
That, opening, bids them enter in and sing,—
Are portions of the soul, and while they stay,
Lords of its action molding all at will.
There is a symphony, I know not whose,
That seems to bear my spirit far away,
To regions not of Earth nor yet of Heaven,
Where neither am I I, nor air, nor clay,
My soul, a portion of the waves of song,
Reverberating ’twixt the earth and moon. ”

“ The wood became transfigured; and, behold!
With hair of wavy gold
A presence walked there; and its beauty was
The beauty not of Earth: and then I heard
Within my heart vague voices, murmurous
And multitudinous as leaves that sow
The firmament when winds of autumn blow.
IV
And I perceived
The voices were but one voice made of sighs,
That sorrowed in this wise:
“I am the child-soul that grew up and died,
The child-soul of the world that once believed,
Believed in me, but long ago denied;
The Faery Faith it needs no more to-day,
The folk-lore Beauty long since passed away.” ”

“ And beauty with wealth brings wooers tall
Whom she snares with her golden hair.
“Though beauty be well and be wealth to all,
And wealth without beauty draw men,
Beauty must come to the vaulted wall,
And what is wealth to her then?...
“This skeleton face was beautiful erst;
These sockets were brighter than stars;
And she bartered her beauty for gold accurst—
But the story is older than Mars!” ...
And he blinked at the moon from his grinning cell,
And the darnels and burdocks were stirred,
Cold-swept of the wind, and I shuddered.—Well!
Perhaps ’twas my heart I had heard. ”

“ 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! ”

“ White Sleep, who leads me ’mid her poppies, weighed
With dewy slumber; from whose chalices
She culls white dreams to lay on human hearts
In pearly clusters sparkling now with tears
And now with smiles; the blossoms of her soul.
She, on her shadowy pinions, winging high,
Bears me from pole to pole of her white star,
The continents like clouds beneath our feet,
The seas like mists; then drops me, meteor-like,
A million leagues, through all the gulfs of God,
Down, down to Earth again; a sound of stars,
Streaming from burning orbits into night,
About my soul, about my soul like fire. ”

“ I tune my lute and strike my harp:
And often from some twilight tower
A lady drops to me a flower,
That bids me scale the moat’s steep scarp,
And climb to love within her bower.
I heed them not, but go my ways:
What is their passion unto me!
My songs are only in thy praise;
Thy face alone it is I see,
That fills my heart with melody—
My sweet aubade! that makes my days
All music, singing here in me!
One time a foul knight in his towers
Sneered thus: “God’s blood! why weary us
With this one woman all our hours!—
Sing of our wenches! ”

“ Make of my heart a lute, for Love to wake
With tripping tune;
Or Loss to crush against her breast and break
With wilder croon.
Upon the mountains of the morning lands,
Where all may look,
Let Hope arise and lift with astral hands
His starry book.
Up bars of stars, the golden notes of skies,
On night’s black scroll
Let the moon’s music lift, and with it rise
Despair’s dark soul.
Apportion, O my God, the hope or fear,
The grief or glee!
Thine be the purpose of each smile, each tear
Eternally. ”

“ Silent and dark, smoothes Earth’s cold sister sphere{233}
Her lunar chasteness, whiter than blown foam!
As o’er a troubled brow a hand of love:
As on a restless heart the balm of sleep,
Caressing softening all care away.
See, where the roses, at the wood’s dark edge,
In many a languid bloom, bow to the moon
And the dim river’s lisp; sleep weighs their eyes
With damask lashes of deep petals fringed,
That the rude, frolic bee,—rough paramour,—
So often kissed beneath the noonday sun.
How cool the breezes touch the tired head! ”

“ 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. ”

“ The soul is fain to dream beneath its spell.—
And heart-admitted to their presence there,
Those intimacies of the earth and air,
It shall hear things too wonderful to tell,
Too deep to interpret, and more sweet than prayer.
And you may see the things that are unseen,
And hear the things that never have been heard:
The whisper of the woods, in gray and green,
Will walk by you, its heart a wildwood bird;
Or by your side, in hushed and solemn wise,
The silence sit; and clothed in glimmering dyes{330}
Of pearl and purple, with a sunset word,
The dusk steal to you with tenebrious eyes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Night with feet of moon-tinged mist and wind
Swept o’er them now, but as she passed she bent,
Meseemed, and kissed each modest bloom and left
A brilliant on its brow, that bashful hung,
Freighted with love: then, groping up her train
Of star-stained crape, that billowed breeze-like by,
I seemed to hear her whisper as she passed:
“Sleep, sleep, my children! Lo, I bring to you
God’s best gift, sleep! the soft, the misty eyed;
The strange, the wonderful! the cure for care!” ”

“ How Earth hath said its secret,—to
The violet’s appealing blue,—
Of fragrance; old as Earth is old,
The knowledge that is never told?
Shall I behold and yet forget,
The soft blue of the heaven fell,
Between the dusk and dawn, to tell
Its purpose, to the violet,
Of beauty none hath fathomed yet?
Between the Earth and Heav’n, above,
The wind goes singing all day long;
And he who listens to its song
May catch an instant’s meaning of
The end of life, the end of love.
II
The gods of Greece are mine once more! ”

“ In a voice as still as a rose unfolds,—
“You have come at last: now nothing holds:
Give me your hand: let us wander away.
“Let us wander away through the Shadow Wood,
Through the Shadow Wood to the Shadow Land,
Where the trees have speech and the blossoms brood,
Like visible music; and, hand in hand,{338}
The winds and the waves go, rainbow-hued:
Where ever the voice of beauty sighs,
And ever the dance of dreams goes on;
Where nothing grows old: and the dead and gone,
And the loved and the lost, smile into your eyes. ”

“ From the dividing cloud, that winds compel,
The moon sweeps, big and bright.{344}
Moon-mists and pale perfumes,
Wind-wafted through the dusk:
There is a sound as if unfolding blooms
Voiced their sweet thoughts in musk.
A spirit is abroad
Of music and of sleep;
The moon and mists have made for it a road
Adown the violet deep.
It breathes a tale to me,
A tale of ancient day;
And, like a dream, again I seem to see
Those towers old and gray.
That castle by the foam,
Where once our hearts made moan:
And through the night again you seem to come
Down statued stairs of stone. ”

“ An exhalation seems to beat, of sound,
An audible perfume; slowly as the fang
Of dusty gold the lily’s cone puts forth
To drink the sunlight and to lure the bee:
A mist of music, delicate as the shapes
Who ride the rainbow bubbles of the foam
Of mountain cataracts; or, who, heeled with flame,
Wing-tipped with fire, make couriers of the winds,
And, zoned with opal, chariot the morning star.
Then soft complaints that fill the waiting heart
With dreams of love long-cherished; love-dreams found
On morning mountains, splendid with the dawn. ”

“ The mallow, like an Elfland moon,
Along the stream gleams grottoed gold;
Its bell-shaped blossom seems to hold
All the lost beauty of last June.
September’s mist haunts, white and cold,
The windings of the forest stream,
As death might haunt a thought or dream.
And who with idle words hath stood,
With idle thoughts, and gazed into
The face of one he loved and knew,{15}
Dying in all her womanhood?
No words, but silence, then will do,
No thoughts but help the heart to hear:
So seems it with the fading year. ”

“ The things no man may see!
IV
If I should find thee dreaming
Upon the wild-rose lea,
The heart within thee gleaming
And breathing like a bee,
Between the real and seeming,
What wouldst thou say to me,
Thou presence none may see?
V
O thou, who, haply, tellest
To birds their wild wood glee;
Who in the water wellest
As murmuring melody;
And in the wood-wind dwellest
As music,—sing to me
Of that no man may see! ”

“ Unbind thy temples! thank life for its sorrow,
Its longing and despair.
With love within, what heart shall halt and wither,
Athirst for rivered hills?
Moaning, “Mine! mine! what hate hath led me hither
Unto a sky that kills?”
Unworthy thou! if faith should sink and falter;
Blind hand and blinder eye
Bind the blind hope upon thy doubt’s old altar
And stab it till it die.
Thou canst not say thy toil and tears have never
Communed with lovely sleep!
Had night before thine eyeballs—night forever
To lead thee to the deep!{91}
Ay! ”

“ A sense of something that is sad and strange;
Of something that is felt as death is felt,—
As shadows, phantoms, in a haunted grange,—
Around me seems to melt.
It rises, so it seems, from the decay
Of the dim woods; from withered leaves and weeds,
And dead flowers hanging by the woodland way
Sad, hoary heads of seeds.
And from the cricket’s song,—so feeble now
’Tis like a sound heard in the heart, a call
Dreamier than dreams;—and from the shaken bough,
And acorns’ drowsy fall.
From scents and sounds it rises, sadly slow,
This presence, that hath neither face nor form ”

“ That shake the wild sleet from wild hair and crowd
Heaven with tumultuous bulks,—he comes, low-browed
And heavy-eyed; the hail, like stinging sand,
Whirls white behind, swept backward by his band
Of wild-hoofed gales that o’er the world ring loud.
All day the tatters of his dark cloak stream
Congealing moisture, till in solid ice
The forests stand; and, clang on thunderous clang,
All night is heard,—as in the moon’s cold gleam
Tightens his grip of frost, his iron vise,—
The boom of bursting boughs that icicles fang. ”

“ Earth tablets us: man lives and is
Man’s own long commentary.
Is one begat at Bassora,
One lies at Damietta dying—
The plausibilities of God
All possibles o’erlying.
But when lust burns within the flesh—
Hell’s but a homily on Heaven—
Put then the individual first,
And of thyself be shriven.
Neither in adamant nor brass
The scrutinizing eye records it:
The arm is rooted in the heart,
The heart that rules and lords it. ”

“ I am the seed within its pod;
The worm within its closed cocoon:
The wings within the circling clod,
The germ that gropes through soil and sod
To beauty, radiant in the noon:
I am all these, behold! and more—
I am the love at the world-heart’s core.
{396} THE HEAVEN-BORN
Not into these dark cities,
These sordid marts and streets,
That the sun in his rising pities,
And the moon with sorrow greets,
Does she, with her dreams and flowers,
For whom our hearts are dumb,
Does she of the golden hours,
Earth’s heaven-born Beauty come. ”

“ 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. ”