Poems

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

The verses composing this volume have been selected by the author almost entirely from the five-volume edition of his poems published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company in 1907. A number have been included from the three or four volumes which have been published since the appearance of the Collected Poems; namely, three poems from the volume entitled "Nature Notes and Impressions," E. P. Button & Co., New York; one poem from "The Giant and the Star," Small, Maynard & Co., Boston; Section VII and part of Section VIII of "An Ode" written in commemoration of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and published by John P. Morton & Co., Louisville, Ky.; some five or six poems from "New Poems," published in London by Mr. Grant Richards in 1909; and three or four selections from the volume of selections entitled "Kentucky Poems," compiled by Mr. Edmund Gosse and published in London by Mr. Grant Richards in 19O2. Acknowledgment and thanks for permission to reprint the various poems included in this volume are herewith made to the different publishers.

The two poems, "in Arcady" and "The Black Knight" are new and are published here for the first time.

In making the selections for the present book Mr. Cawein has endeavored to cover the entire field of his poetical labors, which extends over a quarter of a century. With the exception of his dramatic work, as witnessed by one volume only, "The Shadow Garden," a book of plays four in number, published in 1910, the selection herewith presented by us is, in our opinion, representative of the author's poetical work.

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,"

I had responded to every note of the changing music. I did not always respond audibly either in public or in private, for it seemed to me that so old a friend might fairly rest on the laurels he had helped bestow. But when that last volume came, I said to myself, "This applausive silence has gone on long enough. It is time to break it with open appreciation. Still," I said, "I must guard against too great appreciation; I must mix in a little depreciation, to show that I have read attentively, critically, authoritatively." So I applied myself to the cheapest and easiest means of depreciation, and asked, "Why do you always write Nature poems? Why not Human Nature poems?" or the like. But in seizing upon an objection so obvious that I ought to have known it was superficial, I had wronged a poet, who had never done me harm, but only good, in the very terms and conditions of his being a poet. I had not stayed to see that his nature poetry was instinct with human poetry, with his human poetry, with mine, with yours. I had made his reproach what ought to have been his finest praise, what is always the praise of poetry when it is not artificial and formal. I ought to have said, as I had seen, that not one of his lovely landscapes in which I could discover no human figure, but thrilled with a human presence penetrating to it from his most sensitive and subtle spirit until it was all but painfully alive with memories, with regrets, with longings, with hopes, with all that from time to time mutably constitutes us men and women, and yet keeps us children. He has the gift, in a measure that I do not think surpassed in any poet, of touching some smallest or commonest thing in nature, and making it live from the manifold associations in which we have our being, and glow thereafter with an inextinguishable beauty. His felicities do not seem sought; rather they seem to seek him, and to surprise him with the delight they impart through him. He has the inspiration of the right word, and the courage of it, so that though in the first instant you may be challenged, you may be revolted, by something that you might have thought uncouth, you are presently overcome by the happy bravery of it, and gladly recognize that no other word of those verbal saints or aristocrats, dedicated to the worship or service of beauty, would at all so well have conveyed the sense of it as this or that plebeian.

If I began indulging myself in the pleasure of quotation, or the delight of giving proofs of what I say, I should soon and far transcend the modest bounds which the editor has set my paper. But the reader may take it from me that no other poet, not even of the great Elizabethan range, can outword this poet when it comes to choosing some epithet fresh from the earth or air, and with the morning sun or light upon it, for an emotion or experience in which the race renews its youth from generation to generation. He is of the kind of Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth and Coleridge, in that truth to observance and experience of nature and the joyous expression of it, which are the dominant characteristics of his art. It is imaginable that the thinness of the social life in the Middle West threw the poet upon the communion with the fields and woods, the days and nights, the changing seasons, in which another great nature poet of ours declares they "speak in various language." But nothing could be farther from the didactic mood in which "communion with the various forms" of nature casts the Puritanic soul of Bryant, than the mood in which this German-blooded, Kentucky-born poet, who keeps throughout his song the sense of a perpetual and inalienable youth, with a spirit as pagan as that which breathes from Greek sculpture—but happily not more pagan. Most modern poets who are antique are rather over-Hellenic, in their wish not to be English or French, but there is nothing voluntary in Mr. Cawein's naturalization in the older world of myth and fable; he is too sincerely and solely a poet to be a posseur; he has his eyes everywhere except on the spectator, and his affair is to report the beauty that he sees, as if there were no one by to hear.

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.

From The North American Review. Copyright, 1908, by the North American

Review Publishing Company.

POEMS

HYMN TO SPIRITUAL DESIRE

I

 
  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.
 

II

 
  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.
 

III

 
  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.
 

IV

 
  "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

I

 
  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.
 

II

 
  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….
 

III

 
  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.
 
 
    No bird sings half so airy,
        No bird of dusk or dawn,
    Thou masking King of Faery!
        Thou red-crowned Oberon!
 

A NIËLLO

I

 
  It is not early spring and yet
  Of bloodroot blooms along the stream,
  And blotted banks of violet,
      My heart will dream.
 
 
  Is it because the windflower apes
  The beauty that was once her brow,
  That the white memory of it shapes
      The April now?
 
 
  Because the wild-rose wears the blush
  That once made sweet her maidenhood,
  Its thought makes June of barren bush
      And empty wood?
 
 
  And then I think how young she died—
  Straight, barren Death stalks down the trees,
  The hard-eyed Hours by his side,
      That kill and freeze.
 

II

 
  When orchards are in bloom again
  My heart will bound, my blood will beat,
  To hear the redbird so repeat,
      On boughs of rosy stain,
  His blithe, loud song,—like some far strain
  From out the past,—among the bloom,—
  (Where bee and wasp and hornet boom)—
      Fresh, redolent of rain.
 
 
  When orchards are in bloom once more,
  Invasions of lost dreams will draw
  My feet, like some insistent law,
      Through blossoms to her door:
  In dreams I'll ask her, as before,
  To let me help her at the well;
  And fill her pail; and long to tell
      My love as once of yore.
 
 
  I shall not speak until we quit
  The farm-gate, leading to the lane
  And orchard, all in bloom again,
      Mid which the bluebirds sit
  And sing; and through whose blossoms flit
  The catbirds crying while they fly:
  Then tenderly I'll speak, and try
      To tell her all of it.
 
 
  And in my dream again she'll place
  Her hand in mine, as oft before,—
  When orchards are in bloom once more,—
      With all her young-girl grace:
  And we shall tarry till a trace
  Of sunset dyes the heav'ns; and then—
  We'll part; and, parting, I again
      Shall bend and kiss her face.
 
 
  And homeward, singing, I shall go
  Along the cricket-chirring ways,
  While sunset, one long crimson blaze
      Of orchards, lingers low:
  And my dead youth again I'll know,
  And all her love, when spring is here—
  Whose memory holds me many a year,
      Whose love still haunts me so!
 

III

 
  I would not die when Springtime lifts
      The white world to her maiden mouth,
  And heaps its cradle with gay gifts,
      Breeze-blown from out the singing South:
  Too full of life and loves that cling;
      Too heedless of all mortal woe,
  The young, unsympathetic Spring,
      That Death should never know.
 
 
  I would not die when Summer shakes
      Her daisied locks below her hips,
  And naked as a star that takes
      A cloud, into the silence slips:
  Too rich is Summer; poor in needs;
      In egotism of loveliness
  Her pomp goes by, and never heeds
      One life the more or less.
 
 
  But I would die when Autumn goes,
      The dark rain dripping from her hair,
  Through forests where the wild wind blows
      Death and the red wreck everywhere:
  Sweet as love's last farewells and tears
      To fall asleep when skies are gray,
  In the old autumn of my years,
      Like a dead leaf borne far away.