The poems of Madison Cawein

Here on this jutting headland, where the trees
Spread a dusk carpet for the sun to cast
And count his golden guineas on, we 'll rest.
Behold th' Ohio Falls: see how it seethes!
Though hardly heard from this high, wooded point,
Yet how it still confuses tongue and ear
With its subdued and low monotonous roar!
Not as it did, however, when we stood
And marked it from the spanning of the bridge
Rushing beneath, impetuous as a herd,—
A tameless herd, with manes of flying spray,—
Between the pillars towering above.
No more does it confound us and confuse;
Its clamor here is softened to a sound,
Incessant and subdued, like that which haunts
The groves of spring, when, like some dim surprise,
A wind, precursor of the rain, rides down
From a gray cloud and sets the leafy tongues
Cool-gossiping of the approaching shower.

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There runs the dam; and where its dark line cuts
The river's sheen, already you may see
The ripples glancing to the summer sun,
As if a host had couched a thousand spears
And tossed a thousand plumes of fleecy foam,
In answer to the challenge of the Falls,
Blown from his limestone battlements, and cried
From his wave-builded city's roaring walls.
And there, you see, the waves like champions charge;
Crowding, wild form on form, their foam-hoofs beat
The ragged rocks that roll them on their way:
Billowing they come; knight-like, to ringing lists,
With shout on shout, tossing a thousand plumes,
A thousand spears in sparkling tournament;
Lifting, opposing each, a silvery shield
Or shining pennon, now that sinks or soars,
And many a glittering sword of twinkling foam,
And many a helmet, shattered in flakes of froth,
That, to the trumpeting wind, hisses away:
While, o'er it all, swell out the rush and roar
Of onset, as of battle borne afar.—
On, on they come, a beautiful, mad troop!
On, on, along the sandy banks that fling
Red pebble-freckled arms far out to stay

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Their ruinous rush, the knightly strife of waves,
Warring, and winding wild their watery horns.

Look, where a thousand oily eddies whirl,
And turn and turn like wheels of liquid steel
Below this headland! 'T is a place that none
Has bottomed yet with sounding lead and line.
Like some huge kraken, coiling vast its length,
The Eddy sleeps; and, bending from the shores,
The spotted sycamores have gazed and gazed,
Watching its slumber as gray giants might
A dragon in the hollow of gaunt hills,
Its serpent bulk wound round some magic hoard.
So long they 've watched, their ancient backs have grown
Humped, gnarled, and bent, but still they gaze and gaze,
Leaning above; and from the glassy waves
Their images stare back their wonderment.
Haply they see the guardian Genius lie
At the dark bottom in an oozy cave
Of coral; webbed, recumbent on his mace
Of mineral; his locks of dripping green
Circling a crown of ore; his fishy eyes
Dull with the aqueous dullness of his realms.

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But when the storm 's abroad and whips the waves
With stinging lashes of the myriad rain,
Or scars with thunder some ancestral oak,
Sire of a forest, then he wakes in wrath,
And on the dark foundation of the stream
Rises, a monarch, crowned with iron crown,
And hurls his challenge upward at the storm,
And rages through the waters; heaves and breaks
Through the wild waves, whose round and murky bulks,
Ribbed white with foam, wallow their monster way,
Like giant herds, along yon edge of rock
O'erstrewn with petrifactions of far time;
Mollusk and trilobite and honeycomb
Of whitest coral; and with mass on mass
Of root-like reptiles; writhings turned to rock;
Huge saurian bulks that, haply, sported there,
Convolved; and, in a moment, when the change,—
Which made and unmade continents and seas,
That teemed and groaned with mammoth and plesiosaur,—
Came, with upheaval of the universe,

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Thro' all their monster spines were struck to stone.

There where uprises a wild knoll, o'erstrewn
With wrecks of ancient forest, in mid-stream
Once rose an island, green and beautiful
With willow and beech, poplar and sycamore;
A river-island where the woodman built,—
Stream-guarded from the savage-haunted shore,—
His rude log cabin. Here he sowed his maize;
Here saw it tassel in the summer heat,
And glance like ranks of feathered Indians through
The glimmering vistas of the broken wood;
Here reaped and sheaved its stalks, all ivory-eared,
In shocks like wigwam rows, when like a maid,
An Indian maid, ruddy in dogwood beads,
The autumn came, soft o'er the sunset hills,
That blushed for love, and underneath her feet
Cast untold gold in leaves and yellow fruit.
Here dwelt the pioneer and here he died,
And mingled his rough dust with the raw earth
And loam of what was once an island; now
A bed of limestone rock and water pools,—
Where, in the quarry, you may see the blast

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Spout heavenward the dust and dirt and stone,
And flap and pound its echoes round the hills
In giant strokes as of some Titan hammer;—
A mound of stump-pierced soil where once an isle,—
As rich and fair in forest and in field
As any isle that rises to a sail
In tropic seas,—arose to kiss the sun.

There lies the other half of what was once
Corn Island: broad the channel beats between.
Lower it lies, and mantled with dwarf brakes
Of willow and of cottonwood and beech,
Degenerate offsprings of the mighty boles
That once o'erbrowed the stream in majesty
Of tall primeval beauty. In the morn,
Ere yet the east assumes its faintest blush,
Here you may hear the melancholy snipe
Piping, or see her paddling in the pools
That splash the low bed of the rocky soil.

Here once the Indian stole in natural craft
From wahoo-bush to bush, from tree to tree,
His head plumes like a bird, below, above,
Fluttering and nodding 'mid the undergrowth;
In his brown hand the pliant, polished bow,
And at his back his gaudy quiver filled

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With tufted arrows headed blue with flint.
And while the deep flamingo-colored west
Flamed on his ruddy cheek, and airy fire
Struck rosy 'thwart the stream, he, swift as thought,
Strung his quick bow and through the gray wild goose,
That rose with clamor from the rushy pool,
Sent a fleet arrow; crested with the quills
Which yesterday, perhaps, its mate's gray wing
Made beautiful; and plucked to decorate
The painted shaft that should to-day speed home
And redden all their white with kindred blood:
It falling, gasping at his moccasined feet,
Breathed out its wild life, while the lonely brave
Whooped to the sunset, and yon faint blue hills
Answered his exultation with a whoop.

1885.

University of Virginia Library

THE FALLS OF THE OHIO