The poems of Madison Cawein

What lily lilier than her face!
More virgin than her lips I kissed!
When morn, like God, with gold and grace,
Broke massed in mist! broke massed in mist!

III

Her dead face seems to rise up before him:

The face that I said farewell to,
Pillowed a flower on flowers,
Comes back, with its eyes to tell to
My soul what my heart should quell to
Calm, that is mine at hours.

Dear, is your soul still daggered
There by something amiss?
Love—is he ever laggard?
Hope—is her face still haggard?
Tell me what it is!

You, who are done with to-morrow!
Done with these worldly skies!
Done with our pain and sorrow!
Done with the griefs we borrow!
Joys that are born of sighs!

Must we say “gone forever?”
Or will it all come true?

104

Does mine touch your thought ever?
And, over the doubts that sever,
Rise to the fact that 's you?

Love, in my flesh so fearful,
Medicine me this pain!—
Love, with the eyes so tearful,
How can my soul be cheerful,
Seeing its joy is slain! ...

Gone!—'t was only a vision!—
Gone! like a thought, a gleam!—
Such to our indecision
Utter no empty mission;—
Truth is in all we dream!

IV

He
sinks into deep thought:

There are shadows that compel us,
There are powers that control:
More than substance these can tell us,
Speaking to the human soul.

In the moonlight, when it glistened
On my window, white of glow,
Once I woke and, leaning, listened
To a voice that sang below.

105

Full of gladness, full of yearning,
Strange with dreamy melody,
Like a bird whose heart was burning,
Wildly sweet it sang to me.

I arose; and by the starlight,
Pale beneath the summer sky,
There I saw it, full of far light,—
My dead joy go singing by.

In the darkness, when the glimmer
Of the storm was on the pane,
Once I sat and heard a dimmer
Voice lamenting in the rain.

Full of parting and unspoken
Heartbreak, faint with agony,
Like a bird whose heart was broken,
Moaning low it cried to me.

I arose; and in the darkness,
Wan beneath the winter sky,
There I saw it, cold to starkness,—
My dead love go wailing by.

106

V

He
arouses from his abstraction, buries his face in his hands and thinks:

So long it seems since last I saw her face,
So long ago it seems,
Like some sad soul in unconjectured space,
Still seeking happiness through perished grace
And unrealities, a little while
Illusions lead me, ending in the smile
Of Death, triumphant in a thorny place,
Among Love's ruined roses and dead dreams.

Since she is gone, no more I feel the light,—
Since she has left all dark,—
Cleave, with its revelation, all the night.
I wander blindly, on a crumbling height,
Among the fragments and the wrecks and stones
Of Life, where Hope, amid Life's skulls and bones,
With weary face, disheartened, wild and white,
Trims her pale lamp with its expiring spark.

Now she is dead, the Soul, naught can o'erawe,—
Now she is gone from me,—
Questions God's justice that seems full of flaw,
As is His world, where misery is law,

107

And all men fools, too willing to be slaves.—
My House of Faith, built up on dust of graves,
The wind of doubt sweeps down as made of straw,
And all is night and I no longer see.

VI

He
looks from his window toward the sombre west:

Ridged and bleak the gray, forsaken
Twilight at the night has guessed;
And no star of dusk has taken
Flame unshaken in the west.

All day long the woodlands, dying,
Moaned, and drippings as of grief
Rained from barren boughs with sighing
Death of flying twig and leaf.

Ah, to live a life unbroken
Of the flings and scorns of fate!
Like that tree, with branches oaken,
Strength's unspoken intimate.—

Who can say that we have never
Lived the life of plants and trees?—
Not so wide the lines that sever
Us forever here from these.

108

Colors, odors, that are cherished,
Haply hint we once were flowers:
Memory alone has perished
In this garnished world that's ours.

Music,—that all things expresses,
All for which we 've sought and sinned,—
Haply in our treey tresses
Once was guesses of the wind.

But I dream!—The dusk, dark braiding
Locks that lack both moon and star,
Deepens; and, the darkness aiding,
Earth seems fading, faint and far.

And within me doubt keeps saying—
“What is wrong, and what is right?
Hear the cursing! hear the praying!
All are straying on in night.”

VII

He
turns from the window, takes up a book, and reads:

The soul, like Earth, hath silences
Which speak not, yet are heard:
The voices mute of memories
Are louder than a word.

109

Theirs is a speech which is not speech;
A language that is bound
To soul-vibrations, vague, that reach
Deeper than any sound.

No words are theirs. They speak through things,
A visible utterance
Of thoughts—like those some sunset brings,
Or withered rose, perchance.

The heavens that once, in purple and flame,
Spake to two hearts as one,
In after years may speak the same
To one sad heart alone.

Through it the vanished face and eyes
Of her, the sweet and fair,
Of her the lost, again shall rise
To comfort his despair.

And so the love that led him long
From golden scene to scene,
Within the sunset is a tongue
That speaks of what has been.—

How loud it speaks of that dead day,
The rose whose bloom is fled!

110

Of her who died; who, clasped in clay,
Lies numbered with the dead.

The dead are dead; with them 't is well
Within their narrow room;—
No memories haunt their hearts who dwell
Within the grave and tomb.

But what of those—the dead who live!
The living dead, whose lot
Is still to love—ah, God forgive!—
To live and love, forgot!

VIII

The storm is heard sounding wildly outside with wind and hail:

The night is wild with rain and sleet;
Each loose-warped casement claps or groans:
I hear the plangent woodland beat
The tempest with long blatant moans,
Like one who fears defeat.

And sitting here beyond the storm,
Alone within the lonely house,
It seems that some mesmeric charm
Holds all things—even the gnawing mouse
Has ceased its faint alarm.

111

And in the silence, stolen o'er
Familiar objects, lo, I fear—
I fear—that, opening yon door,
I'll find my dead self standing near,
With face that once I wore.

The stairway creaks with ghostly gusts:
The flue moans; all its gorgon throat
One wail of winds: ancestral dusts,—
Which yonder Indian war-gear coat
With gray, whose quiver rusts,—

Are shaken down.—Or, can it be,
That he who wore it in the dance,
Or battle, now fills shadowy
Its wampumed skins? and shakes his lance
And spectral plume at me?—

Mere fancy!—Yet those curtains toss
Mysteriously as if some dark
Hand moved them.—And I would not cross
The shadow there, that hearthstone's spark,
A glow-worm sunk in moss.

Outside 't were better!—Yes, I yearn
To walk the waste where sway and dip
Deep, dark December boughs—where burn
Some late last leaves, that drip and drip
No matter where you turn.

112

Where sodden soil, you scarce have trod,
Fills oozy footprints—but the blind
Night there, though like the frown of God,
Presents no fancies to the mind,
Like those that have o'erawed.—

The months I count: how long it seems
Since summer! summer, when with her,
When on her porch, in rainy gleams
We watched the flickering lightning stir
In heavens gray as dreams.

When all the west, a sheet of gold,
Flared,—like some Titan's opened forge,—
With storm; revealing, manifold,
Vast peaks of clouds with crag and gorge,
Where thunder-torrents rolled.

Then came the wind: again, again
Storm lit the instant earth—and how
The forest rang with roaring rain!—
We could not read—where is it now?—
That tale of Charlemagne:

That old romance! that tale, which we
Were reading; till we heard the plunge
Of distant thunder sullenly,
And left to watch the lightning lunge,
And storm-winds toss each tree.

113

That summer!—How it built us there,
Of sorcery and necromance,
A mental-world, where all was fair;
A land like one great pearl, a-trance
With lilied light and air.

Where every flower was a thought;
And every bird, a melody;
And every fragrance, zephyr brought,
Was but the rainbowed drapery
Of some sweet dream long sought.

'Mid which we reared our heart's high home,
Fair on the hills; with terraces,
Vine-hung and wooded, o'er the foam
Of undiscovered fairy seas,
All violet in the gloam.

O land of shadows! shadow-home,
Within my world of memories!
Around whose ruins sweeps the foam
Of sorrow's immemorial seas,
To whose dark shores I come!

How long in your wrecked halls, alone
With ghosts of joys must I remain?
Between the unknown and the known,
Still hearing through the wind and rain
My lost love moan and moan.

114

IX

He
sits by the slowly dying fire. The storm is heard with increased violence:

Wild weather. The lash of the sleet
On the gusty casement, clapping—
The sound of the storm like a sheet
My soul and senses wrapping.

Wild weather. And how is she,
Now the rush of the rain falls serried
There on the turf and the tree
Of the place where she is buried?

Wild weather. How black and deep
Is the night where the mad winds scurry!—
Do I sleep? do I dream in my sleep
That I hear her footsteps hurry?

Hither they come like flowers—
And I see her raiment glisten,
Like the robes of one of the hours
Where the stars to the angels listen.

Before me, behold, how she stands!
With lips high thoughts have weighted,
With testifying hands,
And eyes with glory sated.

115

I have spoken and I have kneeled:
I have kissed her feet in wonder—
But, lo! her lips—they are sealed,
God-sealed, and will not sunder.

Though I sob, “Your stay was long!
You are come,—but your feet were laggard!—
With mansuetude and song
For the heart your death has daggered.”

Never a word replies,
Never, to all my weeping—
Only a sound of sighs,
And of raiment past me sweeping. ...

I wake; and a clock tolls three—
And the night and the storm beat serried
There on the turf and the tree
Of the place where she is buried.

University of Virginia Library

5. PART V WINTER

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

5. PART V
WINTER