The poems of Madison Cawein

He held it possible that he
Who idolizes one that's dead,
With that strange liquid instantly
Might raise them, living red:
And so he thought, “'Tis mine at last
To live and love the love that's past;
The joy without the grief and pain.
The dead shall live and love again.”

For he had loved one till for him
Her face had grown his spirit-part:
Though dead, she seemed to him less dim
Than men in street and mart.
He labored on; for, truth to say,
In toil alone his pleasure lay,
His art, through which, sometime, he thought,
Back to his arms she would be brought.

He kept such trysts as phantoms keep,
Pale distances about his soul;
And moved like one who walks asleep,
Attaining no sure goal:

Yet blither than a younger heart
At crucible and glass retort
He labored; for his love was prism
To irisate toil's egoism.

He drained wan draughts from out a cup,
A globe of vague and flaming gold,
Held from the darkness, brimming up,
By something white and cold,
That wreathed faint fingers round its brim,
Slim flakes of foam; and, soft and dim,
Stooped out of fiery-bound abysses
To print his brow with icy kisses.

At last within his trembling hand
An ancient flask burnt, starry rose;
A liquid flame of ruby fanned,
Heart-like, with crimson throes:
And in the liquid, like a flower,
A starlike face bloomed for an hour,
Then slowly faded to a skull
With eyes that mocked the beautiful.

'Though all his life had been so strange,
Yet stranger now it seemed to be;—
What was it led him forth to range
'Mid graves and mystery?

What led him to that one, dim tomb,
Where he could read within the gloom
The name of one who lay within
With all of silence, naught of sin?

Untainted, so it seemed, and made
By death's cold kisses still more fair,
He found her; raised her; softly laid
Her raven depths of hair
Upon his shoulder: and the pearls,
Around her neck and in her curls,
Less pale were than the kingly calm
Upon his face that showed no qualm.

And through the night, beneath the moon,
Across the windy hill, the gloom
Of forests where the leaves lay strewn,
He brought her to his room:
And in the awfulness of death,
That filled her wide eyes with its breath,
He set her in a carven chair
Where the still moon could kiss her hair.

One moment then he paused to think:
Then to her lips, all drawn and dead,
His strange elixir pressed and—“Drink!
Drink life and love!” he said.

And it—it drank; the dead drank slow:
And in its eyes there came a glow:
Yet still as stone its body sate,
With eyes of hell and lips of hate.

Still as fall-frozen ice its face,
And thin its voice as drizzled rain,
When in its rotting silk and lace
It rose and lived again:
Its bosom moved not while it spake;
Nor moved its lips; and half awake
Its eyes seemed with enchanted sleep
A century long in night's old keep.

And, stooping o'er, it whispered low—
A sound like a vibrating wire,
Or like the hiss of falling snow
In flutterings faint of fire:—
“In me, behold, you see your toil!
In me your love! A thing to coil
Around your life thus!—Make entire!—
The demon of your dead desire!”

And where, before, was quietness,
Was violence of hate and evil—
Yet all its form seemed passionless,
A corpse that held a devil! . . .

But who shall say the hands were its
That made within his throat these pits?—
They found him dead; and by him, one
Who clasped him close, a skeleton.

University of Virginia Library

THE ELIXIR OF LOVE