The poems of Madison Cawein

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

University of Virginia Library

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