The poems of Madison Cawein

The hurl and hurry of the winds of March,
That tore the ash and bowed the pine and larch,
And filled the night with rushings,—like the crew
Of the Wild Huntsman,—and the days with hue
And cry of storm, soft in the heaven's porch
Have laid them down:—loud winds, that trampled through
The forests with enormous, scythe-like sweep,
And from the darkened deep,
The battlemented heavens, thunder-blue,
Rumbled the arch,
The rocking arch of all the booming oaks,
With stormy chariot-spokes:
Chariots, from which wild bugle-blasts they blew
In warlike challenge. . . . Now the wind-flower sweet
Misses the fury of their ruining feet,
The trumpet-thunder of resistless flight,
Crashing and vast, obliterating light;

310

Sweeping the skeleton madness down
Of last-year's leaves; and, overhead,
Hurrying the giant foliage of night,
Gaunt clouds that streamed with tempest.
. . . Now each crown
Of ancient woods, that clamored with their tread,
The frenzy of their passage, stoops no more,
Hearing no more their clarion-command,
Their chariot-hurl and the wild whip in hand.
No more, no more,
The forests rock and roar
And tumult with their shoutings.
Hushed and still
Is the green-gleaming and the sunlit hill,
Along whose sides,
Flushing the dewy moss and rainy grass—
Beneath the topaz-tinted sassafras,
Pale, aromatic as some orient wine—
The violet fire of the bluet glides,
The amaranthine flame
Of sorrel and of bluebell runs;
And through the drabs and duns
Of rotting leaves, the moonéd celandine,
Line upon lovely line,
Deliberate, goldens into birth:
And, ruby and rose, the moccasin-flower hides:

311

Innumerable flowers, with which she writes her name,
April, upon the page,
The winter-withered parchment of old earth;
Her fragrant autograph, that gives it worth
And loveliness that take away its age.

II

Here where the woods are wet,
The blossoms of the dog's-tooth violet
Seem meteors in a miniature firmament
Of wild-flowers, where, with rainy sound and scent
Of breeze and blossom, dim the April went:
Their tongue-like leaves of umber-mottled green,
So thickly seen,
Seem dropping words of gold,
Inaudible syllables of a magic old.
Beside them, near the wahoo-bush and haw,
Blooms the hepatica;
Its slender flowers upon swaying stems
Lifting chaste, solitary blooms,
Astral, and twilight-colored,—frail as gems
That star the diadems
Of elves and sylvans, piercing pale the glooms;—
Or like the wands, the torches of the fays,

312

That link lone, leafy ways
With slim, uncertain rays:—
(The faëry people, whom no eye may see,
Busy, so legend says,
With budding bough and leafing tree,
The blossom's heart o' honey and honey-sack o' the bee,
And all dim thoughts and dreams,
That take the form of flowers, as it seems,
And haunt the banks of greenwood streams,
Showing in every line and curve,
Commensurate with our love, an intimacy,
A smiling confidence or sweet reserve.)

There, at that leafy turn,
Of trailered rocks, rise fronds of hart's-tongue fern:
Fronds that my fancy names
Uncurling gleeds of emerald and gold,
Whose feathering flames
Were kindled in the musky mould,
And now, as stealthy as the graying morn,
Thorn upon woolly thorn,
Build up, and silently unfold
Faint, cool, green fires, that burn
Uneagerly, and spread around
An elfin light above the ground,

313

Like that green, rayless glow
A spirit, lamped with crystal, makes below
In dripping caves of labyrinthine moss,
Or grottoes of the weedy undertow.—
And in the underwoods, around them, toss
The white-hearts with their penciled leaves,
That, 'mid the shifting gleams and glooms,
The interchanging shine and shade,
Seem some soft garment made
By visionary hands, that none perceives;
Hands busy with invisible looms
Of woodland shine and shade; a shadowy light,
Whose figments interbraid,
Carpeting the woods with colors and perfumes.—
Or, are they fragments left in flight,
These flow'rs that scatter every glade
With windy, rippling white,
And breezy, fluttering blue,
Of her wild gown that shone upon my sight,
A moment, in the woods I wandered through?
April's, who fled this way?
April, whom still I follow,
Whom still my dreams pursue;
Who leads me on by many a tangled clue
Of loveliness, until in some green hollow,
Born of her fragrance and her melody,
But lovelier than herself and happier, too,

314

Cradled in blossoms of the dogwood-tree,
My soul shall see,
White as a sunbeam in the heart of day,
The infant, May.

III

Up, up, my heart! and forth where none perceives!
'Twas this which that sweet lay meant
You heard in dreams. Come, let us take rich payment,
For every care that grieves,
From Nature's prodigal purse. 'Twas this that May meant
By sending forth the wind which round our eaves
Whispered all night;—or was 't the spirit who weaves,
From gold and glaucous green of early leaves,
Spring's regal raiment?—
Up, up, my heart, and forth where none perceives!

Come, let us forth, my heart, where none divines!
Into far woodland places,
Where we may meet the fair assembled races,
Beneath the guardian pines,

315

Of May's first flowers. . . . Poppy-celandines,
And starry trilliums, bugled columbines,
With which her hair, her radiant hair she twines,
And loops and laces.—
Come, let us forth, my heart, where none divines!

Forth, forth, my heart, and let us find our dreams,
There, where they haunt each hollow!
Dreams luring us with oread feet to follow,
With flying feet of beams,
Fleeter and lighter than the fleetest swallow:
Dreams, holding us with dryad glooms and gleams,
With Naiad eyes, far stiller than still streams,
That have beheld and still reflect, it seems,
The god Apollo.—
Forth, forth, my heart, and let us find our dreams!

Out, out, my heart, the world is white with spring.
Long have our dreams been pleaders:
Now let them be our firm but gentle leaders.
Come, let us forth and sing
Among the amber-emerald-tufted cedars,

316

And balm-o'-Gileads, cotton-woods, a-swing
Like giant censers, that, from leaf-cusps fling
Balsams of gummy gold, bewildering
The winds their feeders.
Out, out, my heart, the world is white with spring.

Up, up, my heart, and all thy hope put on.
Array thyself in splendor.
Like some bright dragon-fly, some May-fly slender,
The irised lamels don
Of thy new armor; and, where burns the centre,
Refulgent, of the opening rose of dawn,
Spread thy wild wings, and, ere the hour be gone,
Bright as a blast from some bold clarion,
Thy Dream-world enter.—
Up, up, my heart, and all thy hope put on.

IV

And then I heard it singing,
The wind that touched my hair,
A song of wild expression,
A song that called in session
The wild-flowers sweetly swinging,
The wild-flowers lightly flinging
Their tresses to the air.

317

And first, beneath a bramble arch,
The bloodroot rose; each bloom a torch
Of hollow snow, within which, bright,
The calyx grottoed golden light.

Hepatica and bluet,
And gold corydalis,
Arose as to an aria;
Then wild-phlox and dentaria,
In rapture, ere they knew it,
Trooped forward, nodding to it,
Faint as a first star is.

And then a music,—to the ear
Inaudible,—I seemed to hear;
A symphony that seemed to rise
And speak in colors to the eyes.

I saw the Jacob's-ladder
Ring violet peal on peal
Of perfume, azure-swinging;
The bluebell slimly ringing
Its purple chimes; and, gladder,
Green note on note, the madder
Bells of the Solomon's-seal.

Now very near, now faintly lost,
I saw their fragrant music tossed;
Mixed dimly with white interludes
Of trilliums starring cool the woods.

318

Then choral, solitary,
I saw the celandine
Smite bright its golden cymbals,
The starwort shake its timbrels,
The whiteheart's horns of Fairy,
With many a flourish airy,
Strike silvery into line.

And, lo, my soul they seemed to draw,
By chords of loveliness and awe
Into a Fairy world afar
Where all man's dreams and longings are.

V

And then a spirit looked down at me
Out of the deeps of the opal morn:
Its eyes were blue as a sunlit sea,
And young with the joy of a star that has just been born:
And I seemed to hear, with my soul, the rose of its cool mouth say:—

“Long I lay, long I lay,
High on the Hills of the Break-of-Day,
Where ever the light is green and gray,
And the gleam of the moon is a silvery spray,
And the stars are glimmering bubbles.

319

Now from the Hills of the Break-of-Day
I come, I come, on a rainbow ray,
To laugh and sparkle, to leap and play,
And blow from the face of the world away,
Like mists, its griefs and troubles.”

VI

And now that the dawn is everywhere,
Let us take this path through this wild, green place,
Where the rattlesnake-weed shows its yellow face,
And the lichens cover the rocks with lace:
Where tannin-tinct is the woodland air,
Let us take this path through the oaks where, thin,
The low leaves whisper, “The day is fair”;
And waters murmur, “Come in, come in,
Where you can hark to our waterfalls,
And the wind of their foam can play with your hair,
And soothe away care.—
Come here, come here, where our water calls.”

Berry blossoms, that seem to flow
As the winds blow,

320

Blackberry blossoms swing and sway
To and fro
Along the way,
Like ocean spray on a breezy day,
Over the green of the grass as foam on the green of a bay,
When the world is white and green with the white and the green of May.

VII

The dewberries are blooming now;
The days are long, the nights are short;
Each haw-tree and each dogwood bough
Is bleached with bloom, and seems a part,—
Reflected palely on her brow,—
Of dreams that haunt the Year's young heart.

But this will pass; and presently
The world forget the spring that was;
And underneath the wild-plum tree,
'Mid hornet hum and wild-bee's buzz,
Summer, in dreamy reverie,
Will sit all warm and amorous.

Summer, with drowsy eyes and hair,
Who walks the orchard aisles between;

321

Whose hot touch tans the freckled pear,
And crimsons peach and nectarine;
And, in the vineyard everywhere,
Bubbles with blue the grape's ripe green.

Where now the briers blossoming are,
Soon will the berries darkly glow;
Then Summer pass: and star on star,
Where now the grass is strewn below
With petals, soon, both near and far,
Will lie the obliterating snow.

VIII

But now the bluets blooming,
The bluets brightly blue,
O'er which the bees go booming,
Drunk with the honey-dew,
From wood-ways which they strew,
Make eyes of love at you. . . .
O slender Quaker-ladies,
With eyes of heavenly hue,
Who, where the mossy shade is,
Hold quiet Quaker-meeting,
Now tell me, is it true
That these wild-bees are raiders?
Bold gold-galloonéd raiders?

322

Gold-belted ambuscaders?—
Or are they serenaders,
Your gold-hipped serenaders,
That, to your ears repeating
Old ballads, come to woo,
And win the hearts of you,
The golden hearts of you?

And here the bells of th' huckleberries toss, so it seems, in time,
Delicate, tenderly white, thick by the wildwood way;
Clusters swinging, it seems, inaudible peals of rhyme,
Music visibly dropped from the virginal lips of the May,
Crystally dropped, so it seems, bar upon blossoming bar,
Pendent, pensively pale, star upon hollowed star.

IX

The star-flower now, that disks with gold
The woodland moss, the forest grass,
Already in a day is old,
Already doth its beauty pass;
Soon, undistinguished, with the mould
'Twill mingle and 'twill mix, alas.

323

The bluet, too, that spreads its skies,
Its little heavens, at our feet;
And crowfoot-bloom, that, with soft eyes
Of amber, now our eyes doth greet,
Shall fade and pass, and none surmise
How once they made the Maytime sweet.

X

But the crowfoot-bloom still trails its gold
Along the edges of the oak-wood old;
And there, where spreads the pond, still white are seen
The lilies islanded between
The pads' round archipelagoes of green;
The jade-dark pads that pave
The water's wrinkled wave;
In which the vireo and the sparrow lave
Their fluttered breasts and wings,
Preening their backs, with many twitterings,
With necks the moisture streaks;
Then dipping deep their beaks,
To which the beaded coolness clings,
They bend their mellow throats
And let the freshness trickle into notes.

And now you hear
The red-capped woodpecker rap near;

324

And now that acrobat,
The yellow-breasted chat,
Calls high and clear,
Chuckling his grotesque music from
Some bough that he hath clomb.
And now, and now,
Upon another bough,
Hark how the honey-throated thrush
Scatters the forest's listening hush
With notes of limpid harmony,
Taking the woods with witchery—
Or is 't a spirit, none can see.
Hid in the top of some old tree,
Who, in his house of leaves, of haunted green,
Keeps trying, silver-sweet, his sunbeam flute serene?

XI

And then as I listened I seemed to see,
Out of the sunset's ruin of gold,
A presence, a spirit, look down at me,
With eyes that were grave with the grief of a world grown old;
And I seemed to hear, with my soul, the flame of its sad mouth sigh:

325

“Now good-by, now good-by.
Down to the Caves of the Night go I;
Where a shadowy couch of the purple sky,
That the moon and the starlight curtain high,
Is spread for my joy and sorrow:
Down to the Caves of the Night go I,
Where side by side with mystery
And all the Yesterdays I'll lie;
And where from my body, before I die,
Will be born the young To-morrow.”

XII

And here where the dusk steals on, you see,
Violet-mantled, from tree to tree,
The milkwort's spike of lavender hue,—
Of rosy blue,—
Tipped by the weight of a passing bee,—
Nods like a goblin night-cap, slim, sedate,
That night shall tassel with the dew,
Beneath a canopy of rose and rue.
And as the purple state
Of twilight crowds the sunset's crimson gate,
Now one, now two,
Drifting the oaks' dark vistas through,
The screech-owl's cry of “Who, oh, who,
Who stays so late?”
Drops like a challenge down to you.

326

The silence deepens; it seems so still,
That, if you laid to the tree your ear,
You too might hear
Its great roots growing into the hill;
Or there on the twig of the oak-tree tall,
The gray-green egg in the gray-green gall
Split, and the little round worm and white,
That grows to a gnat in a summer night,
Uncurl in its nest as it dreams of flight.
In the heart of the weed that grows near by,—
If you laid your ear
To a leaflet near,—
You too might hear, if you, too, would try,
The little gray worm, that becomes a fly
A gray wood-fly, a rainbowed fly,
As it feels a yearning for wings within,
Minute of movement, steadily,—
As a leaf-bud pushes from forth a tree,—
Under the milk of its larval skin,
The outward pressure of wings begin.

Far off a vesper-sparrow lifts its song,
Lost in the woods that now are beryl-wan;
The path is drowned in dusk, is almost gone,
Where now a fox or rabbit steals along:
Dark is each vine-roofed hollow where, withdrawn,

327

The creek-frog sounds his guttural gong,
Like some squat dwarf or gnome,
Seated upon his temple's oozy dome,
Summoning the faithful unto prayer,
Muezzin-like, the worshipers of the moon,
The insect people of the earth and air,
Who join him in his twilight tune.

Along the path, where the lizard hides,
An instant shadow, the spider glides;
The hairy spider, that haunts the way,
Crouching black by its earth-bored hole,
An insect ogre, that lairs with the mole,
Hungry, seeking its insect prey,
Fast to follow and swift to slay.—
And over your hands and over your face
The cobweb brushes its phantom lace:
And now, from many a stealthy place,
Woolly-winged and gossamer-gray,
The forest moths come fluttering,
Marked and mottled with lichen hues,
Seal-soft umbers and downy blues,
Dark as the bark to which they cling.

XIII

Now in the hollow of a hill,—
Like a glow-worm held in a giant hand,—

328

Under the sunset's last red band,
And one star hued like a daffodil,
The windowed lamp of a cabin glows;
The charcoal-burner's, whose hut is poor
But always open; beside whose door
An oak grows gnarled and a pine stands slim.
Clean of soul, though of feature grim,
Here he houses where no one knows,
His only neighbors the cawing crows,
That make a roost of the pine's top limb:
His only friend the fiddle he bows
As he sits at his door in the eve's repose
Making it chuckle and sing and speak,
Lovingly pressed to his swarthy cheek.

And over many a root, through flowers and weeds,
Past lonely places where the racoon breeds,
By many a rock and water lying dim,
Roofed with the brier and the bramble-rose,
Under a star and the new-moon's rim,
Downward the wood-way leads to him,
Down where his lone lamp gleams and glows,
A pencil slim
Of marigold light under leaf and limb.

329

XIV

Ere that small sisterhood of misty stars,
The Pleiadës, consents to grace the sky;
While still through sunset's golds and cinnabars
The evening-star, like an Aladdin eye
Of bright enchantment, at the day's last hour,
Looks downward from its twilight-builded tower,
Listen, and you may hear, now low, now high,
A voice, a summons, fainter than a flower.

There is a fellowship so still and sweet,
A brotherhood, that speaks, unwordable,
In every tree, in every stream you meet,
The soul is fain to dream beneath its spell.—
And heart-admitted to their presence there,
Those intimacies of the earth and air,
It shall hear things too wonderful to tell,
Too deep to interpret, and more sweet than prayer.

And you may see the things that are unseen,
And hear the things that never have been heard:
The whisper of the woods, in gray and green,
Will walk by you, its heart a wildwood bird;
Or by your side, in hushed and solemn wise,
The silence sit; and clothed in glimmering dyes

330

Of pearl and purple, with a sunset word,
The dusk steal to you with tenebrious eyes.

Then through the ugliness that toils in night.
Uncouth, obscure, that hates the glare of day,
Dull things that pierce the earth, avoid the light,
And hide themselves in clamminess and clay,—
The dumb, ungainly things, that make a home
Of mud and mire they hill and honeycomb,—
Through these, perhaps, in some mysterious way
Beauty may speak, fairer than wind-wild foam.

Not as it speaks—an eagle message—drawn
In starry vastness from night's labyrinths:
Not uttering itself from forth the dawn
In egret hues: nor from the cloud-built plinths
Of sunset's splendor, speaking burningly
Unto the spirit; nor from flow'rs the bee
Makes mouths of musk of, cymes of hyacinths,—
But from the things that type humility.

From things despised.—Ev'n from the crawfish there,
Hollowing its house of ooze—a wet, vague sound
Of sleepy slime; or from the mole, whose lair,
Blind-tunneled, corridors the earth around—

331

Beauty may draw her truths, as draws its wings
The butterfly from the dull worm that clings,
Cocoon and chrysalis; and from the ground
Address the soul through even senseless things.

The soul, that oft hath heard the trees' huge roots
Fumble the darkness, clutching at the soil;
The bird-like beaks of the imprisoned shoots
Peck through the bark and into leaves uncoil;
Hath heard the buried seed split through its pod,
Groping its blind way up to light and God;
The fungus, laboring with gnome-like toil,
Heave slow its white orb through the encircling sod.

The winds and waters, stars and streams and flowers,
The very stones have tongues: and moss and fern
And even lichens speak. This world of ours
Is eloquent with things that bid us learn
To pierce appearances, and so to mark,
Within the rock and underneath the bark,
Heard through some inward sense, the dreams that turn
Outward to light and beauty from the dark.

332

XV

Then it came to pass as I gazed on space
That I met with Mystery, face to face.
Within her eyes my wondering soul beheld
The eons past, the eons yet to come
At cosmic labor; and the stars,—that swelled,
Flaming or nebulous, from the darkness dumb,
In their appointed places, world and sun,
I saw were truths made visible, whose sum
Proclaimed one truth, the Word of Him, the One.

And it came to pass as I went my ways
That I met with Beauty, face to face.
Within her eyes my worshiping spirit saw
The moments busy with the dreams whence spring
Earth's lovelinesses: and all things that awe
Man's soul with their perfection—everything
That buds and bourgeons, blossoming above—
I saw were letters of enduring law,
Whose chapters make the beautiful book of Love.

University of Virginia Library

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