The poems of Madison Cawein

The mottled moth at eventide
Beats glimmering wings against the pane;
The slow, sweet lily opens wide,
White in the dusk like some dim stain;
The garden dreams on every side
And breathes faint scents of rain:
Among the flowering stocks they stand;
A crimson rose is in her hand.

I

Outside her garden. He waits musing:

Herein the dearness of her is;
The thirty perfect days of June
Made one, in maiden loveliness
Were not more sweet to clasp and kiss,
With love not more in tune.

Ah me! I think she is too true,
Too spiritual for life's rough way:
So say her eyes,—her soul looks through,—
Two bluet blossoms, watchet-blue,
Are not more pure than they.

So kind, so beautiful is she,
So soft and white, so fond and fair,
Sometimes my heart fears she may be
Not long for Earth, and secretly
Sweet sister to the air.

II

Dusk deepens. A whippoorwill calls.

The whippoorwills are calling where
The golden west is graying;
“'Tis time,” they say, “to meet him there—
Why are you still delaying?

“He waits you where the old beech throws
Its gnarly shadow over
Wood violet and the bramble rose,
Frail lady-fern and clover.

“Where elder and the sumac peep
Above your garden's paling,

Whereon, at noon, the lizards sleep,
Like lichen on the railing.

“Come! ere the early rising moon's
Gold floods the violet valleys;
Where mists, like phantom picaroons
Anchor their stealthy galleys.

“Come! while the deepening amethyst
Of dusk above is falling—
'Tis time to tryst! 'tis time to tryst!”
The whippoorwills are calling.

They call you to these twilight ways
With dewy odor dripping—
Ah, girlhood, through the rosy haze
Come like a moonbeam slipping.

III

He
enters the garden, speaking dreamily:

There is a fading inward of the day,
And all the pansy sunset clasps one star;
The twilight acres, eastward, glimmer gray,
While all the world to westward smoulders far.

Now to your glass will you pass for the last time?
Pass! humming some ballad, I know.
Here where I wait it is late and is past time—
Late! and the moments are slow, are slow.

There is a drawing downward of the night;
The bridegroom Heaven bends down to kiss the moon:
Above, the heights hang silver in her light;
Below, the vales stretch purple, deep with June.

There in the dew is it you hiding lawny?
You? or a moth in the vines?—
You!—by your hand! where the band twinkles tawny!
You!—by your ring, like a glow-worm that shines!

IV

She approaches, laughing. She speaks:
You'd given up hope?

He
Believe me!

She
Why! is your love so poor?

He
No. Yet you might deceive me!

She
As many a girl before.—
Ah, dear, you will forgive me?

He
Say no more, sweet, say no more!

She
Love trusts; and that's enough, my dear.
Trust wins through love; whereof, my dear,
Love holds through trust: and love, my dear,
Is—all my life and lore.

He
Come, pay me or I'll scold you.—
Give me the kiss you owe.—
You run when I would hold you?

She
No! no! I say! now, no!—
How often have I told you,
You must not use me so?

He
More sweet the dusk for this is,
For lips that meet in kisses.—
Come! come! why run from blisses
As from a dreadful foe?

V

She
stands smiling at him, shyly, then speaks:
How many words in the asking!
How easily I can grieve you!—
My “yes” in a “no” was a-masking,
Nor thought, dear, to deceive you.—
A kiss?—the humming-bird happiness here
In my heart consents. ... But what are words,
When the thought of two souls in speech accords?
Affirmative, negative—what are they, dear?
I wished to say “yes,” but somehow said “no.”

The woman within me knew you would know,
Knew that your heart would hear.

He
speaks:
So many words in the doing!—
Therein you could not deceive me;
Some things are sweeter for the pursuing:
I knew what you meant, believe me.—
Bunched bells of the blush pomegranate, to fix
At your throat ... Six drops of fire they are ...
Will you look—where the moon and its following star
Rise silvery over yon meadow ricks?
While I hold—while I bend your head back, so ...
For I know it is “yes” though you whisper “no,”
And my kisses, sweet, are six.

VI

Moths flutter around them. She speaks:

Look!—where the fiery
Glow-worm in briery
Banks of the moon-mellowed bowers

Sparkles—how hazily
Pinioned and airily
Delicate, warily,
Drowsily, lazily,
Flutter the moths to the flowers.

White as the dreamiest
Bud of the creamiest
Rose in the garden that dozes,
See how they cling to them!
Held in the heart of their
Hearts, like a part of their
Perfume, they swing to them
Wings that are soft as a rose is.

Dim as the forming of
Dew in the warming of
Moonlight, they light on the petals;
All is revealed to them;
All!—from the sunniest
Tips to the honiest
Heart, whence they yield to them
Spice, through the darkness that settles.

So to our tremulous
Souls come the emulous
Agents of love; through whose power

All that is best in us,
All that is beautiful,
Selfless and dutiful,
Is manifest in us,
Even as the scent of a flower.

VII

Taking her hand he says:
What makes you beautiful?
Answer, now, answer!—
Is it that dutiful
Souls are all beautiful?
Is it romance or
Beauty of spirit,
Which souls, that merit,
Of heaven inherit?—
Have you an answer?

She,
roguishly:
What makes you lovable?
Answer, now, answer!—
Is it not provable
That man is lovable
Just because chance, or
Nature, makes woman

Love him?—Her human
Part 's to illumine.—
Have you an answer?

VIII

Then, regarding him seriously, she continues:

Could I recall every joy that befell me
There in the past with its anguish and bliss,
Here in my heart it hath whispered to tell me,—
They were no joys like this.

Were it not well if our love could forget them,
Veiling the Was with the dawn of the Is?
Dead with the past we should never regret them,
Being no joys like this.

Now they are gone and the Present stands speechful,
Ardent of word and of look and of kiss,—
What though we know that their eyes are beseechful!—
They were no joys like this.

Were it not well to have more of the spirit,
Living high Futures this earthly must miss?
Less of the flesh, with the Past pining near it?
Knowing no joys like this!

IX

Leaving the garden for the lane. He, with lightness of heart:
We will leave reason,
Sweet, for a season:
Reason were treason
Now that the nether
Spaces are clad, oh,
In silvery shadow—
We will be glad, oh,
Glad as this weather!

She,
responding to his mood:
Heart unto heart! where the moonlight is slanted,
Let us believe that our souls are enchanted:—
I in the castle-keep; you are the airy
Prince who comes seeking me; love is the fairy
Bringing us two together.

He
Starlight in masses
Over us passes;
And in the grass is
Many a flower.—

Now will you tell me
How 'd you enspell me?
What once befell me
There in your bower?

She
Soul unto soul!—in the moon's wizard glory,
Let us believe we are parts in a story:—
I am a poem; a poet you hear it
Whispered in star and in flower; a spirit,
Love, puts my soul in your power.

X

He,
suddenly and very earnestly:

Perhaps we lived in the days
Of the Khalif Haroun er Reshid;
And loved, as the story says
Did the Sultan's favorite one
And the Persian Emperor's son,
Ali ben Bekkar, he
Of the Kisra dynasty.

Do you know the story?—Well,
You were Haroun's Sultana.
When night on the palace fell,

A slave, through a secret door,—
Low-arched on the Tigris' shore,—
By a hidden winding stair
Brought me to your bower there.

Then there was laughter and mirth,
And feasting and singing together,
In a chamber of wonderful worth;
In a chamber vaulted high
On columns of ivory;
Its dome, like the irised skies,
Mooned over with peacock eyes;
Its curtains and furniture,
Damask and juniper.

Ten slave girls—so many blooms—
Stand, holding tamarisk torches,
Silk-clad from the Irak looms;
Ten handmaidens serve the feast,
Each maid like a star in the east;
Ten lutanists, lutes a-tune,
Wait, each like the Ramadan moon.

For you, in a stuff of Merv
Blue-clad, unveiled and jeweled,
No metaphor made may serve:
Scarved deep with your raven hair,

The jewels like fireflies there—
Blossom and moon and star,
The Lady Shemsennehar.

The zone that girdles your waist
Would ransom a Prince and Emeer;
In your coronet's gold enchased,
And your bracelet's twisted bar,
Burn rubies of Istakhar;
And pearls of the Jamshid race
Hang looped on your bosom's lace.

You stand like the letter I;
Dawn-faced, with eyes that sparkle
Black stars in a rosy sky;
Mouth, like a cloven peach,
Sweet with your smiling speech;
Cheeks, that the blood presumes
To make pomegranate blooms.

With roses of Rocknabad,
Hyacinths of Bokhara,—
Creamily cool and clad
In gauze,—girls scatter the floor
From pillar to cedarn door.
Then, a pomegranate bloom in each ear,
Come the dancing-girls of Kashmeer.

Kohl in their eyes, down the room,—
That opaline casting-bottles
Have showered with rose-perfume,—
They glitter and drift and swoon
To the dulcimer's languishing tune;
In the liquid light like stars
And moons and nenuphars.

Carbuncles, tragacanth-red,
Smoulder in armlet and anklet:
Gleaming on breast and on head,
Bangles of coins, that are angled,
Tinkle: and veils, that are spangled,
Flutter from coiffure and wrist
Like a star-bewildered mist.

Each dancing-girl is a flower
Of the Tuba from vales of El Liwa.—
How the bronzen censers glower!
And scents of ambergris pour,
And of myrrh, brought out of Lahore,
And of musk of Khoten! how good
Is the scent of the sandalwood!

A lutanist smites her lute,
Sings loves of Mejnoon and Leila:—
Her voice is an Houri flute;—

While the fragrant flambeaux wave,
Barbaric, o'er free and slave,
O'er fabrics and bezels of gems
And roses in anadems.

Sherbets in ewers of gold,
Fruits in salvers carnelian;
Flagons of grotesque mold,
Made of a sapphire glass,
Brimmed with wine of Shirâz;
Shaddock and melon and grape
On plate of an antique shape.

Vases of frosted rose,
Of alabaster graven,
Filled with the mountain snows;
Goblets of mother-of-pearl,
One filigree silver-swirl;
Vessels of gold foamed up
With spray of spar on the cup.

Then a slave bursts in with a cry:
“The eunuchs! the Khalif's eunuchs!—
With scimitars bared draw nigh!
Wesif and Afif and he,
Chief of the hideous three,
Mesrour!—the Sultan 's seen
'Mid a hundred weapons' sheen!”

Did we part when we heard this?—No!
It seems that my soul remembers
How I clasped and kissed you, so. ...
When they came they found us—dead,
On the flowers our blood dyed red;
Our lips together, and
The dagger in my hand.

XI

She,
musingly:

How it was I can not tell,
For I know not where nor why;
But I know we loved too well
In some world that does not lie
East or west of where we dwell,
And beneath no earthly sky.

Was it in the golden ages?—
Or the iron?—that I heard,—
In the prophecy of sages,—
Haply, how had come a bird,
Underneath whose wing were pages
Of an unknown lover's word.

I forget. You may remember
How the earthquake shook our ships;

How our city, one huge ember,
Blazed within the thick eclipse:
When you found me—deep December
Sealed my icy eyes and lips.

I forget. No one may say
That such things can not be true:—
Here a flower dies to-day,
There, to-morrow, blooms anew. ...
Death is silent.—Tell me, pray,
Why men doubt what God can do?

XII

He,
with conviction:

As to that, nothing to tell!
You being all my belief,
Doubt can not enter or dwell
Here where your image is chief;
Here where your name is a spell,
Potent in joy and in grief.

Is it the glamour of spring
Working in us so we seem
Aye to have loved? that we cling
Even to some fancy or dream,
Rainbowing everything,
Here in our souls, with its gleam?

See! how the synod is met
There of the planets to preach us:—
Freed from the earth's oubliette,
See how the blossoms beseech us!—
Were it not well to forget
Winter and death as they teach us?

Dew and a bud and a star,
All,—like a beautiful thought,
Over man's wisdom how far!—
God for some purpose hath wrought.—
Could we but know why they are,
And that they end not in naught!

Stars and the moon; and they roll
Over our way that is white.—
Here shall we end the long stroll?
Here shall I kiss you good night?
Or, for a while, soul to soul,
Linger and dream of delight?

XIII

They reënter the garden. She speaks somewhat pensively:

Myths tell of walls and cities, lyred of love,
That rose to music.—Were that power my own,

Had I that harp, that magic barbiton,
What had I builded for our lives thereof?—

In docile shadows under bluebell skies,
A home upon the poppied edge of eve,
Beneath pale peaks the splendors never leave,
'Mid lemon orchards whence the egret flies.

Where, pitiless, the ruined hand of death
Should never reach. No bud, no flower fade:
Where all were perfect, pure and unafraid:
And life serener than an angel's breath.

The days should move to music: song should tame
The nights, attentive with their listening stars:
And morn outrival eve in opal bars,
Each preaching beauty with rose-tongues of flame.

O home! O life! desired and to be!
How shall we reach you?—Far the way and dim.—
Give me your hand, sweet! let us follow him,
Love with the madness and the melody.

XIV

He,
observing the various flowers around them:

Violets and anemones
The surrendered Hours
Pour, as handsels, round the knees
Of the Spring, who to the breeze
Flings her myriad flowers.

Like to coins, the sumptuous day
Strews with blossoms golden
Every furlong of his way,—
Like a Sultan gone to pray
At a Kaaba olden.

Warlock Night, with spark on spark,
Clad in dim attire,
Dots with stars the haloed dark,—
As a priest around the Ark
Lights his lamps of fire.

These are but the cosmic strings
Of the harp of Beauty,
Of that instrument which sings,
In our souls, of love, that brings
Peace and faith and duty.

XV

She,
seriously:

Duty?—Comfort of the sinner
And the saint!—When grief and trial
Weigh us, and within our inner
Selves,—responsive to love's viol,—
Hope's soft voice grows thin and thinner.
It is kin to self-denial.

Self-denial! Through whose feeling
We are gainer though we 're loser;
All the finer force revealing
Of our natures. No accuser
Is the conscience then, but healing
Of the wound of which we 're chooser.

Who the loser, who the winner,
If the ardor fail as preacher?—
None who loved was yet beginner,
Though another's love-beseecher:
Love's revealment 's of the inner
Life and God Himself is teacher.

Heine said “no flower knoweth
Of the fragrance it revealeth;
Song, its heart that overfloweth,

Never nightingale's heart feeleth”—
Such is love the spirit groweth,
Love unconscious if it healeth.

XVI

He,
looking smilingly into her eyes, after a pause, lightly:

An elf there is who stables the hot
Red wasp that sucks on the apricot;
An elf, who rowels his spiteful bay,
Like a mote on a ray, away, away;
An elf, who saddles the hornet lean
And dins i' the ear o' the swinging bean;
Who straddles, with cap cocked, all awry,
The bottle-green back o' the dragon-fly.

And this is the elf who sips and sips
From clover-horns whence the perfume drips;
And, drunk with dew, in the glimmering gloam
Awaits the wild-bee's coming home;
In ambush lies where none may see,
And robs the caravan bumblebee:
Gold bags of honey the bees must pay
To the bandit elf of the fairy-way.

Another ouphen the butterflies know,
Who paints their wings with the hues that glow

On blossoms: squeezing from tubes of dew
Pansy colors of every hue
On his bloom's pied pallet, he paints the wings
Of the butterflies, moths, and other things.
This is the elf that the hollyhocks hear,
Who dangles a brilliant in each one's ear;
Teases at noon the pane's green fly,
And lights at night the glow-worm's eye.

But the dearest elf, so the poets say,
Is the elf who hides in an eye of gray;
Who curls in a dimple or slips along
The strings of a lute to a lover's song;
Who smiles in her smile and frowns in her frown,
And dreams in the scent of her glove or gown;
Hides and beckons, as all may note,
In the bloom or the bow of a maiden's throat.

XVII

She,
pensively, standing among the flowers:

Soft through the trees the night wind sighs,
And swoons and dies.
Above, the stars hang wanly white;
Here, through the dark,

A drizzled gold, the fireflies
Rain mimic stars in spark on spark.—
'Tis time to part, to say good night.
Good night.

From fern to flower the night-moths cross
At drowsy loss.
The moon drifts, veiled, through clouds of white;
And pearly pale,
In silvery blurs, through beds of moss,
Their tiny moons the glow-worms trail.—
'Tis time to part, to say good night.
Good night.

XVIII

He,
at parting, as they proceed down the garden:

You say we can not marry, now
That roses and the June are here?
To your decision I must bow.—
Ah, well!—perhaps 't is best, my dear.
Let 's swear again each old love vow
And love another year.

Another year of love with you!
Of dreams and days, of sun and rain!

When field and forest bloom anew,
And locust clusters pelt the lane,
When all the song-birds wed and woo,
I'll not take “no” again.

Oft shall I lie awake and mark
The hours by no clanging clock,
But, in the dim and dewy dark,
Far crowing of some punctual cock;
Then up, as early as the lark
To meet you by our rock.

The rock, where first we met at tryst;
Where first I wooed and won your love.—
Remember how the moon and mist
Made mystery of the heaven above
As now to-night?—Where first I kissed
Your lips, you trembling like a dove.

So, then, we will not marry now
That roses and the June are here,
That warmth and fragrance weigh each bough?
And, yet, your reason is not clear ...
Ah, well! We'll swear anew each vow
And wait another year.

University of Virginia Library

1. PART I LATE SPRING

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

1. PART I
LATE SPRING