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The Poetry of Madison Cawein.

In the Shadow of the Beeches. Unrequited. The Solitary. A Twilight Moth. The Old Farm. The Whippoorwill. Revealment. Hepaticas. The Wind of Spring. The Catbird. A Woodland Grave. Sunset Dreams. The Old Byway. "Below the Sunset's Range of Rose". Music of Summer. Midsummer. The Rain-Crow. Field and Forest Call. Old Homes. The Forest Way. Sunset and Storm. Quiet Lanes. One who loved Nature. Garden Gossip. Assumption. Senorita. Overseas. Problems. To a Windflower. Voyagers. The Spell. Uncertainty.

In the Wood. Since Then. Dusk in the Woods. Paths. The Quest. The Garden of Dreams. The Path to Faery. There are Faeries. The Spirit of the Forest Spring. In a Garden. In the Lane. The Window on the Hill. The Picture. Moly. Poppy and Mandragora. A Road Song. Phantoms. Intimations of the Beautiful. October. Friends. Comradery. Bare Boughs. Days and Days. Autumn Sorrow. The Tree-Toad. The Chipmunk. The Wild Iris. Drouth. Rain. At Sunset. The Leaf-Cricket. The Wind of Winter.

The Owlet. Evening on the Farm. The Locust. The Dead Day. The Old Water-Mill. Argonauts. "The Morn that breaks its Heart of Gold". A Voice on the Wind. Requiem. Lynchers. The Parting. Feud. Ku Klux. Eidolons. The Man Hunt. My Romance. A Maid who died Old. Ballad of Low-Lie-Down. Romance. Amadis and Oriana. The Rosicrucian. The Age of Gold. Beauty and Art. The Sea Spirit. Gargaphie. The Dead Oread. The Faun. The Paphian Venus. Oriental Romance. The Mameluke. The Slave. The Portrait.

The Black Knight. In Arcady. Prototypes. March. Dusk. The Winds. Light and Wind. Enchantment. Abandoned. After Long Grief. Mendicants. The End of Summer. November. The Death of Love. Unanswered. The Swashbuckler. Old Sir John. Uncalled.

THE POETRY OF MADISON CAWEIN

When a poet begins writing, and we begin liking his work, we own willingly enough that we have not, and cannot have, got the compass of his talent. We must wait till he has written more, and we have learned to like him more, and even then we should hesitate his definition, from all that he has done, if we did not very commonly qualify ourselves from the latest thing he has done. Between the earliest thing and the latest thing there may have been a hundred different things, and in his swan-long life of a singer there would probably be a hundred yet, and all different. But we take the latest as if it summed him up in motive and range and tendency. Many parts of his work offer themselves in confirmation of our judgment, while those which might impeach it shrink away and hide themselves, and leave us to our precipitation, our catastrophe.

It was surely nothing less than by a catastrophe that I should have been so betrayed in the volumes of Mr. Cawein's verse which reached me last before the volume of his collected poems.... 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. I believe I had not failed to own its compass, and when--

"He touched the tender stops of various quills,"

An interesting and charming trait of his poetry is its constant theme of youth and its limit within the range that the emotions and aspirations of youth take. He might indeed be called the poet of youth if he resented being called the poet of nature; but the poet of youth, be it understood, of vague regrets, of "tears, idle tears," of "long, long thoughts," for that is the real youth, and not the youth of the supposed hilarity, the attributive recklessness, the daring hopes. Perhaps there is some such youth as this, but it has not its home in the breast of any young poet, and he rarely utters it; at best he is of a light melancholy, a smiling wistfulness, and upon the whole, October is more to his mind than May.

In Mr. Cawein's work, therefore, what is not the expression of the world we vainly and rashly call the inanimate world, is the hardly more dramatized, and not more enchantingly imagined story of lovers, rather unhappy lovers. He finds his own in this sort far and near; in classic Greece, in heroic England, in romantic Germany, where the blue flower blows, but not less in beautiful and familiar Kentucky, where the blue grass shows itself equally the emblem of poetry, and the moldering log in the cabin wall or the woodland path is of the same poetic value as the marble of the ruined temple or the stone of the crumbling castle. His singularly creative fancy breathes a soul into every scene; his touch leaves everything that was dull to the sense before glowing in the light of joyful recognition. He classifies his poems by different names, and they are of different themes, but they are after all of that unity which I have been trying, all too shirkingly, to suggest. One, for instance, is the pathetic story which tells itself in the lyrical eclogue "One Day and Another." It is the conversation, prolonged from meeting to meeting, between two lovers whom death parts; but who recurrently find themselves and each other in the gardens and the woods, and on the waters which they tell each other of and together delight in. The effect is that which is truest to youth and love, for these transmutations of emotion form the disguise of self which makes passion tolerable; but mechanically the result is a series of nature poems. More genuinely dramatic are such pieces as "The Feud," "Ku Klux," and "The Lynchers," three out of many; but one which I value more because it is worthy of Wordsworth, or of Tennyson in a Wordsworthian mood, is "The Old Mill," where, with all the wonted charm of his landscape art, Mr. Cawein gives us a strongly local and novel piece of character painting.

I deny myself with increasing reluctance the pleasure of quoting the stanzas, the verses, the phrases, the epithets, which lure me by scores and hundreds in his poems. It must suffice me to say that I do not know any poem of his which has not some such a felicity; I do not know any poem of his which is not worth reading, at least the first time, and often the second and the third time, and so on as often as you have the chance of recurring to it. Some disappoint and others delight more than others; but there is none but in greater or less measure has the witchery native to the poet, and his place and his period.

It is only in order of his later time that I would put Mr. Cawein first among those Midwestern poets, of whom he is the youngest. Poetry in the Middle West has had its development in which it was eclipsed by the splendor, transitory if not vain, of the California school. But it is deeply rooted in the life of the region, and is as true to its origins as any faithful portraiture of the Midwestern landscape could be; you could not mistake the source of the poem or the picture. In a certain tenderness of light and coloring, the poems would recall the mellowed masterpieces of the older literatures rather than those of the New England school, where conscience dwells almost rebukingly with beauty....

W. D. HOWELLS.

POEMS

HYMN TO SPIRITUAL DESIRE

Mother of visions, with lineaments dulcet as numbers Breathed on the eyelids of Love by music that slumbers, Secretly, sweetly, O presence of fire and snow, Thou comest mysterious, In beauty imperious, Clad on with dreams and the light of no world that we know: Deep to my innermost soul am I shaken, Helplessly shaken and tossed, And of thy tyrannous yearnings so utterly taken, My lips, unsatisfied, thirst; Mine eyes are accurst With longings for visions that far in the night are forsaken; And mine ears, in listening lost, Yearn, waiting the note of a chord that will never awaken.

Like palpable music thou comest, like moonlight; and far,-- Resonant bar upon bar,-- The vibrating lyre Of the spirit responds with melodious fire, As thy fluttering fingers now grasp it and ardently shake, With laughter and ache, The chords of existence, the instrument star-sprung, Whose frame is of clay, so wonderfully molded of mire.

Vested with vanquishment, come, O Desire, Desire! Breathe in this harp of my soul the audible angel of Love! Make of my heart an Israfel burning above, A lute for the music of God, that lips, which are mortal, but stammer! Smite every rapturous wire With golden delirium, rebellion and silvery clamor, Crying--"Awake! awake! Too long hast thou slumbered! too far from the regions of glamour With its mountains of magic, its fountains of faery, the spar-sprung, Hast thou wandered away, O Heart!"

Come, oh, come and partake Of necromance banquets of Beauty; and slake Thy thirst in the waters of Art, That are drawn from the streams Of love and of dreams.

"Come, oh, come! No longer shall language be dumb! Thy vision shall grasp-- As one doth the glittering hasp Of a sword made splendid with gems and with gold-- The wonder and richness of life, not anguish and hate of it merely. And out of the stark Eternity, awful and dark, Immensity silent and cold,-- Universe-shaking as trumpets, or cymbaling metals, Imperious; yet pensive and pearly And soft as the rosy unfolding of petals, Or crumbling aroma of blossoms that wither too early,-- The majestic music of God, where He plays On the organ, eternal and vast, of eons and days."

BEAUTIFUL-BOSOMED, O NIGHT

Beautiful-bosomed, O Night, in thy noon Move with majesty onward! soaring, as lightly As a singer may soar the notes of an exquisite tune, The stars and the moon Through the clerestories high of the heaven, the firmament's halls: Under whose sapphirine walls, June, hesperian June, Robed in divinity wanders. Daily and nightly The turquoise touch of her robe, that the violets star, The silvery fall of her feet, that lilies are, Fill the land with languorous light and perfume.-- Is it the melody mute of burgeoning leaf and of bloom? The music of Nature, that silently shapes in the gloom Immaterial hosts Of spirits that have the flowers and leaves in their keep, Whom I hear, whom I hear? With their sighs of silver and pearl? Invisible ghosts,-- Each sigh a shadowy girl,--

Who whisper in leaves and glimmer in blossoms and hover In color and fragrance and loveliness, breathed from the deep World-soul of the mother, Nature; who over and over,-- Both sweetheart and lover,-- Goes singing her songs from one sweet month to the other.

Lo! 'tis her songs that appear, appear, In forest and field, on hill-land and lea, As visible harmony, Materialized melody, Crystallized beauty, that out of the atmosphere Utters itself, in wonder and mystery, Peopling with glimmering essence the hyaline far and the near....

Behold how it sprouts from the grass and blossoms from flower and tree! In waves of diaphanous moonlight and mist, In fugue upon fugue of gold and of amethyst, Around me, above me it spirals; now slower, now faster, Like symphonies born of the thought of a musical master.-- O music of Earth! O God, who the music inspired! Let me breathe of the life of thy breath! And so be fulfilled and attired In resurrection, triumphant o'er time and o'er death!

DISCOVERY

What is it now that I shall seek Where woods dip downward, in the hills?-- A mossy nook, a ferny creek, And May among the daffodils.

Or in the valley's vistaed glow, Past rocks of terraced trumpet vines, Shall I behold her coming slow, Sweet May, among the columbines?

With redbud cheeks and bluet eyes, Big eyes, the homes of happiness, To meet me with the old surprise, Her wild-rose hair all bonnetless.

Who waits for me, where, note for note, The birds make glad the forest trees?-- A dogwood blossom at her throat, My May among th' anemones.

As sweetheart breezes kiss the blooms, And dews caress the moon's pale beams, My soul shall drink her lips' perfumes, And know the magic of her dreams.

O MAYTIME WOODS!

From the idyll "Wild Thorn and Lily"

O Maytime woods! O Maytime lanes and hours! And stars, that knew how often there at night Beside the path, where woodbine odors blew Between the drowsy eyelids of the dusk,-- When, like a great, white, pearly moth, the moon Hung silvering long windows of your room,-- I stood among the shrubs! The dark house slept. I watched and waited for--I know not what!-- Some tremor of your gown: a velvet leaf's Unfolding to caresses of the Spring: The rustle of your footsteps: or the dew Syllabling avowal on a tulip's lips Of odorous scarlet: or the whispered word Of something lovelier than new leaf or rose-- The word young lips half murmur in a dream:

Serene with sleep, light visions weigh her eyes: And underneath her window blooms a quince. The night is a sultana who doth rise In slippered caution, to admit a prince, Love, who her eunuchs and her lord defies.

Are these her dreams? or is it that the breeze Pelts me with petals of the quince, and lifts The Balm-o'-Gilead buds? and seems to squeeze Aroma on aroma through sweet rifts Of Eden, dripping through the rainy trees.

Along the path the buckeye trees begin To heap their hills of blossoms.--Oh, that they Were Romeo ladders, whereby I might win Her chamber's sanctity!--where dreams must pray About her soul!--That I might enter in!--

A dream,--and see the balsam scent erase Its dim intrusion; and the starry night Conclude majestic pomp; the virgin grace Of every bud abashed before the white, Pure passion-flower of her sleeping face.

THE REDBIRD

From "Wild Thorn and Lily"

Among the white haw-blossoms, where the creek Droned under drifts of dogwood and of haw, The redbird, like a crimson blossom blown Against the snow-white bosom of the Spring, The chaste confusion of her lawny breast, Sang on, prophetic of serener days, As confident as June's completer hours. And I stood listening like a hind, who hears A wood nymph breathing in a forest flute Among the beech-boles of myth-haunted ways: And when it ceased, the memory of the air Blew like a syrinx in my brain: I made A lyric of the notes that men might know:

He flies with flirt and fluting-- As flies a crimson star From flaming star-beds shooting-- From where the roses are.

Wings past and sings; and seven Notes, wild as fragrance is,-- That turn to flame in heaven,-- Float round him full of bliss.

He sings; each burning feather Thrills, throbbing at his throat; A song of firefly weather, And of a glowworm boat:

Of Elfland and a princess Who, born of a perfume, His music rocks,--where winces That rosebud's cradled bloom.

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