The poems of Madison Cawein

Thou sit'st among the sunny silences
Of terraced hills and woodland galleries,
Thou utterance of all calm melodies,
Thou lutanist of Earth's most fecund lute,—
Where no false note intrudes
To mar the silent music,—branch and root,
Playing the fields ripe, orchards and deep woods,
To song similitudes
Of flower and seed and fruit.

II

Oft have I felt thee, in some sensuous air,
Bewitch the wide wheat-acres everywhere
To imitated gold of thy rich hair:
The peach, by thy red lips' delicious trouble,
Blown into gradual dyes
Of crimson, have I seen: have watched thee double—

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With interluded music of thine eyes—
The grapes' rotundities,
Bubble by purple bubble.

III

Deliberate uttered into life intense,
Out of thy song's melodious eloquence
Beauty evolves its just preëminence:
The lily, from some pensive-smitten chord
Drawing significance
Of purity, a visible hush stands: starred
With splendor, from thy passionate utterance,
The rose tells its romance
In blushing word on word.

IV

As star by star day harps in evening,
The inspiration of all things that sing
Is in thy hands and from their touch takes wing:
All brooks, all birds,—whom song can never sate,—
Even the wind and rain,
And frogs and insects, singing soon and late,
Thy sympathies inspire, thy heart's refrain,
Whose sounds invigorate
With rest life's weary brain.

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V

And as the night, like some mysterious rune,
Its beauty makes emphatic with the moon,
Thou lutest us no immaterial tune:
But where dim whispers haunt the cane and corn,
By thy still strain made strong,
Earth's awful avatar,—in whom is born
Thy own deep music,—labors all night long
With growth, assuring morn
Assumes like onward song.

University of Virginia Library

TO SUMMER

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