The poems of Madison Cawein

Beneath great saffron stars and skies, dark-blue,
Among the Cyclades, a happy two,
We sailed; and from the Siren-haunted shore,
All mystic in its mist, the soft wind bore
The Siren's song; where, on the ghostly steeps,
Strange foliage grew, deeps folding upon deeps,
That hung and beamed with blossom and with bud,
Blue-petaled, pallid, or, like urns of blood,
Dripping; or blowing from wide mouths of blooms
On our hot brows cool gales of dim perfumes.
While from the yellow stars, that splashed the skies,
O'er our light shallop brooded mysteries
Of calm and sleep, until the yellower moon
Rose, full of fire, above a dark lagoon;
And, as she rose, the nightingales, on sprays

194

Of heavy, Persian roses, burst in praise
Of her wild loveliness; their boisterous pain
Heard through the pillars of a ruined fane.
And round our lazy keel, that dipped to swing,
The spirits of the foam came whispering;
And from gray Neptune's coral-columned caves
The wet Oceänids rose through the waves;
With naked limbs we saw them breast the spray,
Their pearl-white bodies tempesting the way;
Their sea-green hair, tossed streaming to the breeze,
Scattering with brightness all the tumbled seas.
'Mid columned aisles, seen vaguely through the trees,
We watched the Satyrs chase the Dryades;
Heard Pan's shrill trebles and the Triton's horn
Sound from the flying foam when ruddy Morn,
With dewy eyelids, opened azure eyes,
And, blushing, rose, and left her couch of skies.
We saw the Naiad, clothed with veiling mist,
Half hidden in a bay of amethyst,
With shell-like breasts, and at her hollow ear
A shell's pink labyrinth held up to hear

195

Circean echoes of the Siren's strains
Imprisoned in its chords of vermeil veins:
Then, stealing wily from a grove of pines,
The Oread, in cincture of green vines;
Her cautious feet, fragrant and twinkling wet,
Set in a bed of rainy serpolet;
Her flower-red lips half-parted in surprise,
And expectation in her wondering eyes,
As in the bosk a rustling noise she hears—
A Faun, sly-eyed, with furred and pointed ears,
Who leaps upon her, as upon a dove
A great hawk pinions from the skies above.
Diana sees, and on her wooded hills
Stays her fair band, the stag-hounds' clamor stills—
A senseless statue of cold, weeping stone
Fills his embrace; the Oread is gone.
The stag-hounds bay; again they urge the chase,
While the astonished Faun's bewildered face
Paints all his wonderment, and, wondering,
He bends above the sculpture of a spring.

And so we sailed; and many a morn of balm
Led on the hours of sunny song and calm:
And it was life, to her and me, and love,
With the fair myths below, our God above,

196

To sail in golden sunsets and emerge
In golden morns upon a fretless surge.
But, ah! alas! the stars, that pierce the blue,
Shine not for ever; clouds must gather, too.

I knew not how it came, but in a while
I found myself cast on a desert isle,
Alone with sorrow; wan with doubt and dread;
The seas in wrath and thunder overhead;
Deep down in coral caves the one I love—
No myths below; no God, it seemed, above.

University of Virginia Library

IN MYTHIC SEAS