The poems of Madison Cawein

In farther planets there are men who talk,
Not with their lips, but with their eyes alone,
With beaming eyes and brows that burn with thought:
Pure souls whose sentiments need but be born
To be expressed. Where speech of mouth and tongue
Were barbarous discord. Where no voice imparts

398

Thought, but divulging eye and sensitive brow.
Superior planets, far beyond our sphere,
And nearer God than ages shall combine
To lift our world up with its wrangling woes.
Worlds that are strange to sickness and disease
Of mind and body; perfect mentally,—
Past what we name perfection here on Earth,—
And physically. Morally divine
As creeds have taught us God's high Heaven is.
Worlds where Love makes no playmate of vile Lust;
Where Hope makes no companion of Despair;
Where Power can not trample with fierce feet;
And, impotent, the iron hand of Might
Surrenders its red weapon unto Mind;
Where Truth and Thought are wedded, in one rule
Of far progression, whose white child is Love.

So have I dreamed, and longed to leave sad Earth,
And live anew on some diviner sphere;
A world so higher, lovelier than this,
So spiritually perfected and refined,
That, should an Earth-born mortal,—suddenly
Translated thither,—unprepared behold,

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Dazed with divinity, before the feet
Of its inhabitants he would fall prone
In worship and astonishment; and, all
The exaltation of celestial peace
Singing within, cry out: “Yea, this is Heaven!
How long, O sinner, hast thou dwelt in Hell!”

University of Virginia Library

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