The poems of Madison Cawein

A thought, to lift me up to those
Sweet wildflowers of the pensive woods;
The lofty, lowly attitudes
Of bluet and of bramble-rose:
To lift me where my mind may reach
The lessons which their beauties teach.

A dream, to lead my spirit on
With sounds of fairy shawms and flutes,
And all mysterious attributes
Of skies of dusk and skies of dawn:
To lead me, like the wandering brooks,
Past all the knowledge of the books.

A song, to make my heart a guest
Of happiness whose soul is love;
One with the life that knoweth of
But song that turneth toil to rest:
To make me cousin to the birds,
Whose music needs not wisdom's words.

I

Shall I forget, and yet behold
How Earth hath said its secret,—to
The violet's appealing blue,—
Of fragrance; old as Earth is old,
The knowledge that is never told?

Shall I behold and yet forget,
The soft blue of the heaven fell,
Between the dusk and dawn, to tell
Its purpose, to the violet,
Of beauty none hath fathomed yet?

Between the Earth and Heav'n, above,
The wind goes singing all day long;
And he who listens to its song
May catch an instant's meaning of
The end of life, the end of love.

II

The gods of Greece are mine once more!
The old philosophies again!
For I have drunk the hellebore
Of dreams, and dreams have made me sane—
The wine of dreams! that doth unfold
My other self,—'mid shadowy shrines

Of myths which marble held of old,
Part of the Age of Bronze or Gold,—
That lives, a pagan, 'mid the pines.

Dead myths, to whom such dreams belong!
O beautiful philosophies
Of Nature! crystallized in song
And marble, peopling lost seas,
Lost forests and the star-lost vast,
Grant me the childlike faith that clung.—
Through loveliness that could not last,—
To Heaven in the pagan past,
Calling for God with infant tongue!

III

Idea, god of Plato! one
With beauty, justice, truth and love:
Who, type by type, the world begun
From an ideal world above!
Reason, who into Nature wrought
Your real entities,—which are
Ideas,—giving to our star
Their beauty through reflected thought;

The reminiscences that flame,
Momental, through the mind of man,

Of things his memory can not name,
Lost things his knowledge can not scan,—
Hints of past periods are not these,
His soul hath lived since it had birth
In God?—Yea! who shall say that Earth
More ancient is than he who sees?

IV

Beside us, and yet far above,
She leads us to no base renown—
The Ideal, with her sun-white crown,
And starry raiment of her love:
She leads us by ascending ways
Of Nature to her purposed ends,
Who in the difficult, dark days
Of trial with her smile defends.

Beyond the years, that blindly grope,
To climb with her, from year to year,
To some exalted atmosphere,
Were more than earthly joy or hope!
Though in that atmosphere we find
Not her—her influence, pointing to
New elevations of the mind
By some superior avenue.

V

The climbing-cricket in the dusk
Moves wings of moony gossamer;
Its vague, vibrating note I hear
Among the boughs of dew and musk,
Whence, rustling with a mellow thud,
The ripe quince falls. Low, deep and clear,
The west is bound with burning blood.

The slanting bats beneath the moon,—
A dark disk edge with glittering white,—
Spin loops of intertangled night:
An owl wakes, hooting over soon,
Within the forest far away:
And now the heav'n fills, light by light,
And all the blood-red west grows gray.

I hear no sound of wind or wave;
No sob or song, except the slow
Leaf-cricket's flute-soft tremolo,
Among wet walks grown gray and grave.—
In raiment mists of silver sear,
With strange, pale eyes thou comest, O
Thou Spirit of the Waning-Year!

VI

The hills are full of prophecies
And ancient voices of the dead;
Of hidden shapes that no man sees,
Pale, visionary presences,
That speak the things no tongue hath said,
No mind hath thought, no eye hath read.

The streams are full of oracles,
And momentary whisperings;
An immaterial beauty swells
Its breezy silver o'er the shells
With wordless speech that sings and sings
The real life of unreal things.

No indeterminable thought is theirs,
The stars', the sunsets' and the flowers';
Whose inexpressible speech declares
Th' immortal Beautiful, who shares
This mortal riddle which is ours,
Beyond the forward-flying hours.

VII

The hornet stings the garnet grape,
Whose hull splits with the honeyed heat;—
Fall hears the long loud locust beat

Its song out, where, a girl-like shape,
She watches, through the wine-press' crust,
Sweet trickle of the purple must.

The bee clings to the scarlet peach,
That thrusts a downy cheek between
The leaves of golden gray and green;—
Fall walks where orchard branches reach
Abundance to her hands, or drop
Their ripeness down to make her stop.

The bitter-sweet and sassafras
Hang yellow pods and crimson-black
Along the rails, that ramble back
Among the corn where she must pass;
Where, on her hair, a golden haze,
Showers the pollen of the maize.

Not till 'mid sad, chill scents all day
The green leaf-cricket chirrs its tune,
And underneath the hunter's-moon
The oxen plod through clinging clay,
Or when, beyond the dripping pane,
The night sets in with whirling rain:

Not till ripe walnuts rain their spice
Of frost-nipped nuts down, and the oak

Pelts with brown acorns, stroke on stroke,
The creek that slides through hints of ice;
And in the lane the wagon pulls,
Crunching, through thick-strewn hickory hulls:

Not till through frosty fogs, which hold
Wet mornings with their phantom night,
Like torches glimmering through the white,
The woods burn crimson blurs and gold,
And through the mist come muffled sounds
Of hunting-horns and baying hounds:

Shall I on hills, where looming pines
Against vermilion sunsets stand—
Black ruins in a blood-red land—
In wrecks of sumac and wild vines,
Go seek her, where she lies asleep,
Her dark, sad eyes too tired to weep.

VIII

It holds and beckons in the streams;
It lures and touches us in all
The flowers of the golden fall—
The mystic essence of our dreams:
A nymph blows bubbling music where

Faint water ripples down the rocks;
A faun goes dancing hoiden locks,
And piping a Pandean air,
Through trees the instant wind shakes bare.

Our dreams are never otherwise
Than real when they hold us so;
We in some future life shall know
Them parts of it and recognize
Them as ideal substance, whence
The actual is—(as flowers and trees,
From color sources no one sees,
Draw dyes, the substance of a sense)—
Material with intelligence.

IX

Once more I watch the hills take fire
With dawn; and, shaggy spine by spine,
Flush like dark tyrants o'er their wine,
Who grasp the sword and break the lyre,
And carve the world to their desire;
While, red as blocks where kingdoms bleed,
The rocks trail crimson vine and weed.

To walls of gold, Enchantment built,
Again my fancy bids me go—

Through woods, bewitched with fire, where blow
Wild horns of tournament and tilt—
A fairy-prince, whose spear hath spilt
No blood but in a shadow-world,
While at the real his gage is hurled.

What far, æolian echoes lead
My longing?—as a voice might wake
A lost child from deep sleep and take,
With music of a magic reed,
Him home where love will give him heed:—
What echoes, blown from lands that lie
Melodious 'neath no mortal sky?

X

The fire, to which the Magi prayed,
The Aztecs sacrificed and kneeled,
Whose ceremonies now are sealed,
Whose priests are dust, whose people weighed,
Since God permitted such, should man,—
All ignorant of heavenly ends,—
Despise the means, since Earth began,
God works by to perfect His plan,
Which through immediate forms ascends
Of Nature, lifting, race by race,
Man to the beauty of His face?

Through Nature only we arrive
At God: identical with truth,
By periods of repeated youth,
Through Nature must the Ages strive;
The Epochs, that must purify
Themselves through her experience,
Her knowledge, which each Age lays by
To clothe it better for the sky
In robes of new intelligence
Befitting life, that upwardly
Approaches ends which none can see.

XI

Within the world awake behold
A world asleep . . . the wildwood shades!
With limbs of glimmering coolness lolled
Along the purple forest glades:—
Sleep in each unremembering face,
The sea-worn Greeks knew these of old,
And named “the lotus-eating race.”

Within the life asleep I mark
A life awake; a life intense,
That spurs the sap beneath the bark
With tender hints of violence,
The liquid germs of leaf and bud,

And in the ponderable dark
Fulfils the offices of blood.

O wiser than Thy works!—behind
Thy works,—who shall behold Thy place?
Beyond the suns whose beams burn blind
Before the glory of Thy face!—
Among the least of worlds, shall we
Presume to give to Thee, defined,
A place and personality!

XII

Across the hills, that roll and rise
Beneath the blue, adoring skies,
Maturing Beauty by the old,
Dark forest stands, as might a slave
Before a Sultan sitting grave,
Grim-gazing from a throne of gold.

Across the hills, that rise and fall,
I gaze with eyes grown spiritual,
And see the Spirit of the Dew
From out the morn, that stains the mist
With amber and with amethyst,
Blown, bubble-bright, along the blue.

What king such kingly pomp can show
As on the hills the afterglow?
Where 'mid red woods the maples sit,
Like scarlet-mantled sagamores,
Who, from their totemed wigwam doors,
Watch, through red fires, the ghost-dance flit.

At night, as comes the fox, shall come
The Spirit of the Frost, whose thumb
Shall squeeze the chestnut burs, and press
Each husk bare; whisper every flower
Such tales of death that in an hour
It dies of utter happiness.

Until the moon sets I shall walk,
And listen how the woodlands talk
Of bygone lovely nights and days:
My soul, made silent intimate
Of all their sorrow, soon and late
A portion of the autumn haze.

XIII

What revelations fill with song
The cycles? and to what belong
Life's far convictions of the light?
Through which the spirit waxeth strong,

The darkling soul surmounts the night,
By builded rainbows, to some height
Near mountain stars of Truth and Right,
Beyond the vulture-wing of Wrong?—

To Nature! who adjusts the deeps
Of her soul's needs to man's; and keeps
Such grave response as grief shall hear
When on her heart it sinks and weeps;
For every gladness, clean and clear
Its glad reflection lying near—
The wild accord of hope and fear
Which in her inmost bosom sleeps.

XIV

The mallow, like an Elfland moon,
Along the stream gleams grottoed gold;
Its bell-shaped blossom seems to hold
All the lost beauty of last June.
September's mist haunts, white and cold,
The windings of the forest stream,
As death might haunt a thought or dream.

And who with idle words hath stood,
With idle thoughts, and gazed into
The face of one he loved and knew,

Dying in all her womanhood?
No words, but silence, then will do,
No thoughts but help the heart to hear:
So seems it with the fading year.

XV

The snowy flutter of a hand
Seems beckoning in the morning mist,
And from the mist a jewelled wrist
Of dew now waves us a command:
And in the skies, behold! the Land
Of Far-away-beyond-the-dawn,
Where, crowned with roses wild and wan,
The Futures of the World speed on.

Along the eve a fiery arm
Now points us to the waning west,
And all the sorrow, that oppressed
Our hearts once, straight becomes a charm
Of beauty, whose dim spells transform
The Present to the Long-ago,
All grief to joy,—or seeming so,—
We see through thaumaturgic glow.

XVI

Pearl-lilac blent with pearly rose,
The dawn bloomed slowly out of dusk,—

As some huge cactus from its husk
Bursts vast a bloom whose chalice glows
A grotto of transmuted dyes;—
Such wild, auroral light as flows
On ice-peaks from unearthly skies.

Dove-purple shifting into shades
Of opal,—like the tints which dwell
With fire in the ocean-shell,—
The sunset flashed above the glades
Through skies of nacre and of flame;—
Such supernatural light as braids
Dim coral caves, that have no name.

XVII

Draw from thine eyes the veil that hides
Ideal visions; beckonings
Of loveliness, whose soul abides
Beneath the commonplace of things:
No brook within the woodland then
But shows its sparkling god to thee;
Upon the ancient hills no tree
Whose whispering spirit thou shalt not see,
Fairer than children born of men.

Refine thy flesh that never hears
The inner music of all things,—
The deaf flesh,—from thy spirit's ears,
And list the vaster voice that sings
With pregnant lips unto the Earth:
Mornings, who hymn with gold the sky,
To which the eves with gold reply—
The everlasting heavens that cry
The visible psalms of death and birth.

XVIII

The flowers of the fall I seek:
The purple aster,—like a gauze
Of pearl,—beneath the nodding haws
Or making gay each tangled creek:
The hairy, small herb-Robert, lost,—
Yet seen,—among the weeds which crush
Or crowd it, with its bluish blush;
Its rough, low stalk stung red with frost.

Around the rail-fence, climbing up,
The nightshade hangs rich berries down,—
Clusters of cochineal,—that drown
The flowering bind-weed's pendant cup:
And where the boggy bottom sets
Its burs as breastworks and as tents,

Like bivouacking regiments,
The cat-tails stack their bayonets.

From amaranth—in tree and flower—
To asphodel—in weed and bloom—
The season swings a magic loom
Of sun and mist from hour to hour:
In its wide warp it weaves the dyes
Of morning's brilliant blue and gray;
And crimson through the weft of day
Flings the wild woof of evening skies.

XIX

What intimations made them wise,
The mournful pine, the mighty beech?
Some strange and esoteric speech—
(Communicated from the skies
In secret whispers)—that invokes
The boles that sleep within the seeds,
And out of narrow darkness leads
The vast assemblies of the oaks.

Within his knowledge, what one reads
The poems written by the flowers?
The sermons, past all speech that 's ours,
Preached in the gospel of the weeds?—

O eloquence of coloring!
O thoughts of syllabled perfume!
O beauty uttered into bloom!
Teach me your dreams so I may sing!

XX

What time the great lobelia fills
The wildwood with the blue of spring—
And asters, scattered o'er the hills,
Bloom, starry-sown, through everything—
My fancy takes me wandering,
My fancy, clothed in daffodils.

In lavender lights, which sleep among
The ferns, my heart is at a loss
To find the love that leads along
Down magic ways of tufted moss—
Now, like the brook, it calls across,
Now, like a bird, it lures with song.

It leads me to the land which lies
Within a world no man can see;
Wherein the Elfland cities rise,
Faint haunts of musk and melody;
That with the butterfly and bee
And congregated flowers are wise.

XXI

Upon the Earth what hints are rife,
Of life when change hath left us still!
When death within us doth fulfil
Its end, whose part is one with life!
What hints, which tell us not alone
Immortal is the spirit, for
Flesh too,—corruption can but mar,—
The incorruptible puts on.

The blood but fills a part that 's higher
Of color, and pervades all flowers;
The brain informs the twinkling hours
With dreams of resurrected fire;
The heart performs the function of
A fragrance; and the countenance
Lends new expression to, perchance,
The face of beauty that we love.

XXII

Oh, joy, to walk the way that goes
Through woods of sweet-gum and of beech!
Where, like a ruby left in reach,
The berry of the dogwood glows:
Or where the bristling hillsides mass,

'Twixt belts of tawny sassafras,
Brown shocks of corn in wigwam rows!

Where, in the hazy morning, runs
The stony branch that pools and drips,
The red-haws and the wild-rose hips
Are strewn like pebbles; and the sun's
Own gold seems captured by the weeds;
To see, through scintillating seeds,
The hunters steal with glimmering guns!

Oh, joy, to go the path which lies
Through woodlands where the trees are tall!
Beneath the misty moon of fall,
Whose ghostly girdle prophesies
A morn wind-swept and gray with rain;
When, o'er the lonely, leafy lane,
The night-hawk, like a dead leaf, flies!

To stand within the dewy ring
Where pale death smites the boneset blooms,
And everlasting's flowers, and plumes
Of mint, with aromatic wing!
And hear the creek,—whose sobbing seems
A wild man murmuring in his dreams,—
And insect violins that sing!

Or where the dim persimmon-tree
Rains on the path its frosty fruit,
And in the oak the owl doth hoot,
Beneath the moon and mist, to see
The outcast Year come,—Hagar-wise,—
With far-off, melancholy eyes,
And lips that thirst for sympathy!

XXIII

Along my mind flies suddenly
A wildwood thought that will not die,
That makes me brother to the bee,
And cousin to the butterfly:
A thought, such as gives perfume to
The blushes of the bramble-rose,
And, fixed in quivering crystal, glows
A captive in the prismed dew.

It leads the feet no certain way,
No frequent path of human feet:
Its wild eyes follow me all day,
All day I hear its wild heart beat:
And in the night it sings and sighs
The songs the winds and waters love;
Its wild heart lying tranced above,
And tranced the wildness of its eyes.

XXIV

With eyes that seem to ache with tears
I look beyond the twilight fields:
The stars swing down their shimmering shields,
And fill the phalanx of their spears.
I can not see, I only know
A flower dies beneath my feet;
The fragrance of its death is sweet
And bitter as my heart's own woe.

With thoughts that find not what they seek
I question Earth and Heaven, and find
That they are dark and I am blind,
And in my blindness very weak.
I do not know, I only feel
Behind all death a purpose stands,
With hallowed and magnetic hands,
Beneficent and strong to heal.

XXV

These, too, shall tell me what my heart,
And what my soul desireth:—
The flowers, that bloom serene for death,
The stars, that know no mortal part.
One shall inspire my heart with acts

Of life so that the death responds;
One to the soul breathe higher facts
Of death that shall annul such bonds.

Sufficient for my love these terms,
Beyond my understanding's scope:
I merely know all life must grope
Not downward from its darkling germs.
Sufficient for my faith is such:
That, in the narrow night that binds
The seed, its life shall feel in touch
With light above it seeks and finds.

XXVI

Beyond the violet-colored hill
The golden, deepening daffodil
Of dusk bloomed on heav'n's window-sill:
And, drifting west, the crescent moon
Gleamed like a sword of Scanderoon
A khedive dropped on floors of gold;
Near which,—one loosened gem that rolled
Out of the jewelled scimitar,—
Glittered and shone the evening-star.

Behind the trees, where, darkly deep
As indigo, the shadows sleep,—

As if the Titan world would heap
A throne with purple for its god,
Whose pomp comes with vermilion shod—
The west, 'thwart which the wild-ducks fly,
Burns, richer than the orient dye
Phœnician vessels brought from Tyre,
Deep, murex-stained, with carmine fire.

The light dies down; the skies grow gray:
The sear, dark forests sound and sway:
The ashen rain-clouds roll this way.
The green grig in the withered weeds
Sings, and the wild snipe seeks the reeds.
With hurling winds,—that seem to wail
Like Demon Huntsmen,—dark with hail
And rain, which blot the cabin's light,
Comes on the wild autumnal night.

XXVII

There is a rushing in the woods,
The autumn-haunted solitudes,
When night comes in with winds that sweep
The wild rain from the hills; and reap
The roaring harvest of the leaves
With unseen scythes Death stalks behind,
And Desolation, fierce and blind,
Heaping the storm's tumultuous sheaves.

There is a sighing in the woods,
The hills of autumn solitudes,
When on the night, the winds have strewn
With crowding clouds, the stormy moon
Bursts like a herald shouting Cease!
Through darkness o'er a battlefield
Of Hell; the splendor of his shield
Inscribed with silence and with peace.

XXVIII

The storm,—that makes the sky its own,
And smites its spirit through Earth's nerves,
And, like an instrument which serves
High purposes to us unknown
Of song that knows not that it sings,—
Itself is all majestic things
Imagination forms or feels;
Itself all wonders it reveals
To thought, which knows but semblances
Of such concealed realities.

The star, that flames through storm and crowds
An instant with its utterance
Of silence and serene romance,
And glides again into the clouds,
Shone for some present end; and filled

A moment's need as Heaven willed:—
A thought, some dreamer labored for,
Immaculate as is a star;
A hope, some weary watcher read
Pale in the loved face of his dead.

XXIX

Towards evening, where the sweet-gum flung
Its thorny balls among the weeds,
And where the milkweed's sleepy seeds,—
A fairy Feast of Lanterns,—swung;
The cricket tuned a plaintive lyre,
And o'er the hills the sunset hung
A purple parchment scrawled with fire.

From silver-blue to amethyst
The shadows broadened in the vale;
And, belt by belt, the pearly pale
Aladdin fabric of the mist
Stretched its vague exhalation far;
A jewel on an Afrit's wrist,
One star gemmed sunset's cinnabar.

Then night drew near, as when, alone,
The heart and soul grow intimate;
And on the hills the twilight sate

With shadows, whose wild robes were sown
With dreams and whispers—dreams, that led
The heart once with love's monotone,
And whispers of the living dead.

XXX

Of life and of eternity
These are the dreams that came to me:
The one:—A whitened whirl of sea;
A gallows beetling through the rains,
And, tossing in its rusty chains,
Carrion upon the gallows-tree:
Gaunt ravens swarm above and tear
Long strips from shrivelled skin and hair:
A ship hurls pounding on the rocks:
Wild minute-guns boom through the spume
And crashing surf: out of the gloom
The strangled dead leers down and mocks.

An incorporeal solitude,
Which darkness out of darkness hewed,
The other dream: Enormous deeps
Of naught, where ancient Silence sleeps,
The eldest of Heav'n's Titan brood:—
In unilluminated night,
Vast and insufferable white,

A summit soars: its light, which dyes
Not darkness, of itself is born:
Around its splendor, as in scorn,
Night's dark, defiant chaos lies.

XXXI

Past midnight, gathering from the west,
With rolling rain the storm came on,
And tore and tossed until the dawn,
Like some dark demon of unrest:
The stairways creaked! the chimneys boomed;
I heard the wild leaves blown about
The windy windows; and the shout
Of forests that the storm had doomed.

I listened, and remembered how
On yesterday I went alone
A sunlit path through fields o'ergrown
With sumac brakes, turned crimson now;
Where asters strung blue pearls and white
Beside the goldenrod's soft ruff;
Where thistles, silvery puff on puff,
Danced many a twinkling witch's-light.

Her joy the Autumn uttered so
To skies where gold and azure blent;

Now storm is the embodiment
Of all her utterance of woe:
The two within me so abide,
That of the two my mind partakes,—
As one, who walks asleep, awakes,
Walks on and thinks, “To-night I died.”

XXXII

What sympathies of Heaven and Earth
The human ego enters in!
The universal stain of sin
Which qualifies it from its birth,
Denying it their highest worth.
There is a parallel of kin
'Twixt earth and man, that dignifies
Endeavor with such sympathies.

The all mysterious wisdom waits
In mountain, wood, and waterfall,
Sky, rock and sea, to hear the call
Of something—firmer than the Fates—
Deep in the soul it elevates;
And to the splendor of the All
Advances, through the night's immense,
The spirit of experience.

So think I now while, long and loud,
The wind its maniac music beats,
And storm a madman's song repeats
To echoes in the rushing cloud;
While all the world to wrath is vowed,
And nothing conquers or defeats
The darkness and the rain that raves
Above the all-unheeding graves.

XXXIII

All night the rain-gusts shook the leaves
Around my window; and the blast
Rumbled the flickering flue, and fast
The storm streamed from the dripping eaves.
As if—'neath skies gone mad with fear—
The witches' Sabboth galloped past,
The forests leapt like startled deer.

All night I heard the sweeping sleet;
And when the morning came, as slow
As pale affliction, with the woe
Of all the world dragged at her feet,
No spear of purple shattered through
The dark-gray of the east; no bow
Of gold, whose arrows cleft the blue.

But rain, that whipped the windows; filled
The spouts with rushing; and around
The garden stamped, and sowed the ground
With limbs and leaves; the wood-pool filled
With overgurgling.—Bleak and cold
The fields looked, where the foot-path wound
Through teasel and bur-marigold. . . .

Yet there is kindness in such days
Of gloom, that doth console regret
With sympathy of tears, which wet
Old eyes that watch the back-log blaze—
A kindness, alien to the deep
Glad blue of sunny days that let
No thought in of the lives that weep.

XXXIV

This dawn, through which the Autumn glowers,—
As might a face within our sleep,
With stone-gray eyes that weep and weep,
And wet brows bound with sodden flowers,—
Is sunset to some sister land;
A land of ruins and of palms;
Rich sunset, crimson with long calms,—
Whose burning belt low mountains bar,—

That sees some brown Rebecca stand
Beside a well the camel-band
Winds down to 'neath the evening-star.

O sunset, sister to this dawn!
O dawn, whose face is turned away!
Who gazest not upon this day,
But back upon the day that 's gone!
Enamored so of loveliness,
The retrospect of what thou wast,
Oh, to thyself the present trust!
And as thy past make beautiful
With hues, that never can grow less!
Waiting thy pleasure to express
New beauty, lest the world grow dull.

XXXV

At daybreak from the woodland come
Echoes of hunting; or the chop
Of some far woodman's axe, that cleaves
The tingling oak, whose russet leaves
Drop slowly where the white chips drop:
The air is fragrant with the loam,
Where, through the mists of steaming gold,
The sudden sun strikes fold on fold.

Out of the window, filmed with fog,
I look into the wreck which was
The kitchen-garden, drenched with rain;
Among the death I mark again
One blue convolvulus—that draws
A gray vignette along a log,
With pencilled tendrils washed and wan—
The garden-story's colophon.

XXXVI

More storm than calm, less gold than gray,
Along the years our lives must tread,
Makes sad the scenes around our way,
Makes grave the heavens overhead:
For on life's storied page, behold,
Are adumbrations of the dead!
The neutral tint Time's fingers lay
Around a tale that 's never told.

Time writes with sunshine less than rain,
With starlight less than mist, the scroll—
A thousand memories of pain
To one of joy—of his own soul:
The golden hues of life occur
In his dim palimpsest, whose whole
Death scrawls with dusty lines again,
Making of all a leaden blur.

XXXVII

Down in the woods a sorcerer,
Out of rank rain and death, distils,—
Through chill alembics of the air,—
Aromas that brood everywhere
Among the dingles of the hills:
The bitter myrrh of dead leaves fills
Wet valleys (where the gaunt weeds bleach)
With sodden scents of wood decay;—
As if a spirit all the day
Sat breathing softly 'neath the beech.

With other eyes I see her flit,
The wood-witch of the wild perfumes,
Among her sleepy owls,—that sit,
A fluffy white, in crescent-lit
Dim glens and opalescent glooms:—
Where, for her magic, buds and blooms
Mysterious perfumes, while she stands,
A fragrant shadow, summoning
The eery odors that take wing,
Like bubbles, from her rainy hands.

XXXVIII

With leagues of fog, which showed the sun
An agate-red without a ray,
And drowned the world in ghostly gray,

The chill, autumnal day begun:
A phantom in the mist, a run
Foamed over phantom ledges lone
In forests that seemed far away,
Wild woods of immaterial stone.

With horses saffron to the knees
A country cart drove through the fog;
Its creaking wheels grown one great clog
Of clay, and clanking swingletrees:
Its smothered rumble did not cease
Till hidden in the woodland mist,
Where, leaning on his fresh-cut log,
The muffled woodman blew his fist.

Another world I wander in
Of unlaid ghosts and dreams unfled;
A twilight world of drowsy-head
And mystery, built figment-thin
Between the worlds of death and sin:
Where dim and strange and incomplete,
And substanceless, seem things not dead,
And sorrowful as dimly sweet.

XXXIX

Among the woods they call to me—
The lights that haunt the strand and stream;

Voices of such white ecstasy
As moves with hushed lips through a dream:
They stand in nimbused radiances,
Or flash with glittering limbs across
Their golden shadows on the moss,
Or slip in silver through the trees.

What love can give the heart in me
More hope and exaltation than
The hand of light that tips the tree
And beckons far from marts of man?
That reaches foamy fingers through
The broken ripple, and replies
With sparkling speech of lips and eyes
To souls who seek and still pursue.

XL

Oh, bright the day, and calm and cool
With clouds, like cotton-fields that swoon
Beneath the silver summer moon;
And, quiet as a forest pool,—
Where Autumn sits and combs her locks,
And strews with rainbow leaves and roon,—
The shadows rest upon the rocks.

The sun pours airy amber on
The withered wood-ways, where the late

Green-crickets' shell-like wings vibrate:
And, fainter than lost lines of dawn,
The fields shine labyrinthed with rays,
With gossamer-webs, that imitate
Cloud-figments, or a splintered haze.

Beyond the yarrow's meekness now,
Wood-sorrel's lowliness, and shy
Hepatica's humility,
The Year is grown: makes brave her brow
With crowning crimson of the lands,
And robes her limbs in cardinal dye,
And by the lonely waters stands.

XLI

Pure thought-creations of the mind,
Within the circle of the soul,—
The emanations that control
Life to its God-predestined goal,—
Are spirit shapes no flesh can bind:
Within the soul desire ordains
Achievements which the will constrains;
And far above us, on before,
Our thoughts—a beautiful people—soar,
To wait us on celestial plains.

So Nature pours her thoughts in forms—
Realities we move among—
Of fragrance, color, and of song;
Sense emanations which belong,
Invisible, to spiritual charms;
The sensuous substance of her thought
From immaterial matter wrought—
Matter, which death can not annul,
That constitutes the Beautiful,
And, dead, repeats itself from naught.

XLII

Give me the streams, that counterfeit
The twilight of autumnal skies;
The silent, shadowy waters, lit
With fire like a woman's eyes!
Slow waters that, in autumn, glass
The scarlet-strewn and golden grass,
And drink the sunset's tawny dyes.

Give me the pools, that lie among
The centuried forests! give me those,
Deep, dim, and sad as shadows hung
Dark 'neath the sunset's sombre rose:
Still pools, in whose vague mirrors look—
Like ragged gipsies round a book
Of magic—trees in wild repose.

No quiet thing, or innocent,
Of water, earth, or air shall please
My soul now: but the violent
Between the sunset and the trees:
The fierce, the splendid, and intense,
Like love matures in innocence,
Like mighty music, give me these!

XLIII

As Nature in herself resolves
All parts of beauty to one whole,
And from the perfect whole evolves
The high ideas that control
Advancement, till the time be ripe
To doff disguise and, type by type,
Reveal the emanated soul:

So should the Beautiful in man
Evolve the best in him; to be
The lofty purpose life began
For ends which only Heaven can see—
The absolute, that sees how thought
Its high ideal's shape hath wrought
To be its far affinity.

XLIV

I hold them here; they are no less;
I see them still—the changeful grays
Of threatening skies above the haze—
My hills! that roll long, murmuring miles
Of savage-painted wilderness,
On which the saddened sunlight smiles;
Or, like a fallen angel's frown—
Severe beneath a burning crown—
Through sombre silvers, that oppress
With clouds its glory, rushes down.

I hear the coming storm again;
Again behold the streaming clouds;
The autumn wind drives down and crowds
Wild sibylline voices through the leaves,
To whispering octaves of the rain:
A wilder wind, vibrating, heaves
Vast music through the rolling woods—
Upon my soul the grandeur broods,
Like some archangel's trumpet strain,
Or organ-pomp that sweeps all moods.

XLV

Such circumstance of passionate praise
Hath no religion; and the creeds

No pomp of worship or of grace
Like Nature's, standing face to face
With God, whose inmost thought she reads:
No multitude of words she needs,
Since all her worship is one word
Of love, like that creation heard.

God leaves progression in her care:
Through her it must materialize—
Our Mother! with strong lips of prayer,
Majestic-browed, with hands that bare
Immortal fire from the skies:
Who looks, with no evasive eyes,
Through life, and, smiling, sees beneath
The beautiful, dark eyes of death.

XLVI

Between the sunset and the stars
Long clouds lie—as fierce sachems loom,
In war-paint and the eagle-plume,
Among their wampumed warriors,
When council fires burn red and set
On stoic cheeks the battle-bloom,
That puff the smoking calumet.

Beneath the stars and hunter's-moon
The frost spreads ghostly pearls, that glance

Like dewy jewels in the dance
That whirls on fairied hills of June:
The night is calm; no luminous veil
Conceals the spirit utterance
Of her dark beauty, pure and pale.

XLVII

I sat alone with song and sleep,
And in the singing silence heard
The darkness draw from forth the deep
With star on star, like word on word:
A sound of twilight and swift shades
Materializing into night,
Who hears the breaking waves of light,
And towards the shores of morning wades.

I sat alone with dawn and death,
And in my waking vision saw
The form of silence, like a breath
Of bodiless beauty and of awe,
Whose sibyl eyes said unto me
The things the sealed lips would not word,
That eons of the stars record
In volumes of eternity.

XLVIII

The dead gold of the marybud,
The dusky, tarnished orange-red
Of zinnias, flush the flower-bed,
Like frosty autumn gleams that scud
Tempestuous dusks and stormy dawns
Above the wind-dishevelled lawns.

With tired eyes and heart grown grave,
And thoughts more weary than the night,
I watch the dwindling of the light,
And hear the rising night-winds rave,
As one might hear, when half asleep,
Another self make moan and weep.

XLIX

Behold, the winds have speech and speak!
The stars of heaven are eloquent!
A voice within us bids us seek
The word the flowers say in scent:
The paraclete encouragement
Of beauty that the burning scrolls
Of eve and morning give our souls.

There is one language of the mart;
Another of the rocks and trees:

Unrest and greed is this one's heart;
The other's heart is rest and peace:
Within our souls we know of these;
They lead us by the myths we love,
Yet never see and know not of.

L

When thorn-tree copses still were bare
And black along the turbid brook;
When catkined willows blurred and shook
Great tawny tangles in the air;
In bottomlands, the first thaw makes
An oozy bog, beneath the trees,
Prophetic of the spring that wakes,
Sang the sonorous hylodes.

Now that wild winds have stripped the thorn,
And clogged with leaves the forest-creek;
Now that the woods look brown and bleak,
And webs are frosty white at morn;
At night beneath the spectral sky,
A far foreboding cry I hear—
The wild-fowl calling as they fly?
Or vague voice of the dying Year?

LI

Night,—who within heaven's uttermost
Dark walls uncloses shadowy gates,—
Beyond the Spirit of Light she hates,
Speeds like a ghost before a ghost
Upon the twilight-haunted coast
Of death between the seas of sleep:
Her lips are dumb with awe that hears;
And in her eyes, that never weep,
Is anguish of eternal tears.

Out of the terrible gulfs of God
Into God's awful deeps she goes,
Revealing in heaven's gold and rose
The ways her footsteps tread and trod
From period to period:
Her lips are still—for she hath heard
God's voice that moves the universe:
Her eyes are sad beyond the word—
The eyes of Vastness gazed in hers.

LII

And still my soul holds phantom tryst,
When chestnuts hiss among the coals,
Upon the Evening of All Souls,

When all the night is moon and mist,
And all the world is mystery;
I kiss dear lips that death hath kissed,
And look in eyes no man may see,
Filled with a love long lost to me.

I hear the night-wind's ghostly glove
Flutter the window: then the knob
Of some dark door turn, with a sob
As when love comes to gaze on love
Who lies pale-coffined in a room:
And then the iron gallop of
The storm, who rides outside, his plume
Sweeping the night with dread and gloom.

So fancy takes my mind, and paints
The darkness with eidolon light,
And writes the deads' romance in white
On the dim Evening of All Saints:
Unheard the hissing nuts; the clink
Of falling coals, whose shadow faints
Around me where I sit and think,
Borne far beyond the actual's brink.

LIII

No thing occult of Heaven or Earth,
Or influence of such, I feel

But hath a meaning and a worth
God, in His wisdom, doth conceal:
Reflections of another birth,
Existent with and kin to ours,
Announcing through supernal powers
Facts of a world it would reveal.

In Nature I perceive it, too,
This other life I can not see:
A spirit sparkles in the dew,
The trees have tongues that speak to me:
That Earth is green and Heaven, blue,
The sight alone may satisfy;
The soul sees with a different eye
The meaning 'neath the mystery.

LIV

The shadow of uncertain things
And all unearthly whisperings,—
That premonitions death and blight,—
Leans from the sepulchre of night;
And on the Earth fall shadowings;
And prophecies of near decay;
But, lovelier than a dead delight,
The starlit skies of glittering gray.

Still shall the Season claim and keep
Her wild-girl beauty; doubly deep
The purport of her dreams shall rise
Out of her heart into her eyes,
Till very dreaming makes her weep;
And death, with pale, pure lips and arms,
Shall touch her from the frosty skies,
Making a memory of her charms.

LV

Sometime shall Beauty hide no more
The fair conceptions she conceives
Beneath the abstract veil she weaves
Before her face the few adore;
The self-denying few, who long
Live lofty lives of art and song,
And, dying, leave the world less poor.

No more are these alone when she,
From the subjective world she rules,
Confronts the falsehood of the schools
With her high front of purity:
And on the dark and general way
Lets fall her individual ray
That low as well as high may see.

LVI

The ghost of what was loveliness
Sits in the waning woods, with bare
And bleeding feet, and wintry hair,
And brows the thorns of care distress;
She makes a passion of despair
And, Rachel-like, with eyes wept red,
Refuses to be comforted.

To funeral torches for the Year,
Tree by tall tree, the forests turned;
Then, fiery coals in ashes, burned
A few last leaves among the sear;
Where, robed in purple pomp, she yearned
To die, like some sad queen, and died
Crowned with magnificence and pride.

LVII

She meets us with impressive hands
And eyes of earnest emphasis
Between the known and unknown lands,
And fills our souls with untold bliss,
This spirit of the solitude
Named Meditation; thought-imbued,
On whom all beauty ministers;

Whose silent, dreaming worshipers
Lay unresisting hands in hers,
Knowing their hearts are understood.

The holy harp she holds and smites
Was tuned among concordant spheres;
The heavenly pen with which she writes
Was dipped in angel smiles and tears:
Between her eyebrows and her eyes
The starry stamp of silence lies;
Between her symboled lips and tongue,
The song the stars of morning sung:
To this her heavenly harp is strung,
In that her holy pen is wise.

LVIII

Again the night is wild with rain;
Again distracted with the gale:
Upon the hills I hear a wail
Of lamentation and of pain,
As when, on some high burial-place,
Moaning among the windy graves,
The Indian squaws lament the braves,
Who fell in battle for their race.

Another day of storm shall dawn
Within the east; and, darkly lit,

Like one, with brows abstraction-knit,
Absorbed in moody thought, pass on.—
Bear not too hard, is all I ask,
Upon the hearts that toil and yearn,
O day of clouds! but swiftly turn
To sunshine all your frowning mask.

LIX

No wind is this which cries forlorn
Around the hilltops and the woods!—
Earth, weary of her multitudes
Of dead, despairing of the morn,
Calls through illimitable night
The wailing words no thing may know;
Deep in her memory-haunted sight
Sleeps no remembrance of delight,
But death and everlasting woe.

No wind! a voice whose sense is form;
A form whose sense is but a sound;
That smites the constant skies around,
And shakes the steadfast hills with storm:
Adown life's desolate deep it cries
The words death's sterile lips must learn
From Law, the Law that never dies—
Such utterless, wild speech as sighs
In stone and cinerary urn.

LX

I heard the wind, before the morn
Stretched gaunt, gray fingers 'thwart my pane,
Drive clouds down, a dark dragon train;
Its iron visor closed, a horn
Of steel from out the north it wound.—
No morn like yesterday's! whose mouth,
A cool carnation, from the south
Breathed through a golden reed the sound
Of days that drop clear gold upon
Cerulean silver floors of dawn.

And all of yesterday is lost
And swallowed in to-day's wild light—
The birth deformed of day and night,
The illegitimate, who cost
Its mother secret tears and sighs;
Unlovely since unloved; and chilled
With sorrows and the shame that filled
Its parents' love; which was not wise
In passion as the night and day
That yestermorn made heaven all ray.

LXI

We know not of one mood that 's hers,
Or glad or grave, which has not drawn

Its source from God's deep universe,
As th' hours draw the day from dawn—
Nature's! who holds us quietly
But earnestly, as by a spell,
Whose contact with us seems to be
Actual and yet intangible.

In us she thus asserts her claims
Of kinship and divine control;
God-teacher of exalted aims,
The high consents of heart and soul:
Imperfectly man sees and feels,
Through earthly mediums of his fate,
The premonitions she reveals
For issues that shall elevate.

LXII

Down through the dark, indignant trees,
On indistinguishable wings
Of storm, the wind of evening swings;
Before its insane anger flees
Distracted leaf and the shattered bough:
There is a rushing, as when seas
Of thunder beat an iron prow
On reefs of wrath and roaring wreck:
'Mid stormy leaves, a hurrying speck

Of flickering blackness, driven by,
A mad bat whirls along the sky.

Like some sad shadow, in the eve's
Deep melancholy—visible
As by some strange and twilight spell—
A gaunt girl stands among the leaves,
The night-wind in her dolorous dress:
Symbolic of the life that grieves,
Of toil that patience makes not less,
Her load of faggots fallen there.—
A wilder shadow sweeps the air,
And she is gone: Was it the dumb
Eidolon of the month to come?

LXIII

No songs but what are sorrowful
And sweet in pensive notes and words,
Shall fill my heart,—as singing birds
Might build a nest within a skull. . . .
The nun-like days, in stoles of white,
Chant requiems for the dying Year:
The monk-like nights about her bier,
In cowls of black, with lights that blear,
The service for the dead recite.

Into my soul the litanies
Of life and death strike golden bars:
I hear the far, responding stars,—
Uttering themselves within the skies,—
Reverberate from cause to cause
Results that terminate in man;
From world to world, the rounding plan
Of change,—God's mighty artisan,—
Of which both life and death are laws.

LXIV

No sunlight strews with gold the plain;
No moonlight stains the hill with white;
Clouds, sullen with the undropped rain,
And motionless with unspent spite,
Dome deep with uninvaded gray
The dull, ignoble term of day,
The duller period of night.

Yea, ev'n the mad, marauding Wind,
Who whipped his wild steeds east and west,
Whose whirlwind wheels rolled down and dinned
Along the booming forest's crest,
Lies dead upon his mountains, where
His sister Breezes beat the breast
Sighing through their unshaken hair.

LXV

The griefs of Nature, like her joys,
Are placid and yet passionate;
These, in her heart which knows no hate,
She for the beautiful employs. . . .
Behold how thoughts of happiness
Rainbow the tears on sorrow's face!
Upon the brow of joy no less
Aureates the light of seriousness!
Each to the other lending grace.

Oh, tenderness of grief that knows
Some happiness still lies before!
That for the rose that blooms no more
Will bloom a no less perfect rose!
Oh, pensiveness of joy that takes
Sweet dignity from grief that died!
Remembering that though morning shakes
Her bright locks from blue eyes and wakes,
Night sleeps on the same mountain side.

LXVI

What alchemy does Earth conceal
Desired by the desperate days?
With feet of fog and hands of haze
They search the crumbling woods and steal

With mutterings,—gaunt as hags who deal
In witchcraft,—where each dark tree sways,
And, venerable, with staff aslant,
Death sits like some old mendicant.

Around me all 's despondency,
And grief that holds the unwilling world:
The last gold leaf is wildly hurled
Through sobbing silence over me:
The brook has hushed its wildwood glee,
Sick of itself; and far unfurled,
And melancholy as my soul,
The struggling lights of sunset roll.

LXVII

The song-birds, are they flown away,
The song-birds of the summer-time,
That sang their souls into the day,
And set the laughing hours to rhyme?
No catbird scatters through the hush
The sparkling crystals of its song;
Within the woods no hermit-thrush
Trails an enchanted flute along,
Thridding with vocal gold the hush.

All day the crows fly cawing past:
The acorns drop: the forests scowl:

At night I hear the bitter blast
Hoot with the hooting of the owl.
The wild creeks freeze: the ways are strewn
With leaves that clog: beneath the tree
The bird, that set its toil to tune,
And made a home for melody,
Lies dead beneath the snow-white moon.

University of Virginia Library

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