The Project Gutenberg eBook ofPoemsThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: PoemsAuthor: Madison Julius CaweinAuthor of introduction, etc.: William Dean HowellsRelease date: March 1, 2005 [eBook #7796]Most recently updated: February 16, 2013Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Eric Eldred, S.R. Ellison, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: PoemsAuthor: Madison Julius CaweinAuthor of introduction, etc.: William Dean HowellsRelease date: March 1, 2005 [eBook #7796]Most recently updated: February 16, 2013Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Eric Eldred, S.R. Ellison, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Title: Poems
Author: Madison Julius CaweinAuthor of introduction, etc.: William Dean Howells
Author: Madison Julius Cawein
Author of introduction, etc.: William Dean Howells
Release date: March 1, 2005 [eBook #7796]Most recently updated: February 16, 2013
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Eric Eldred, S.R. Ellison, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS ***
Produced by Eric Eldred, S.R. Ellison, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team
1911
The verses composing this volume have been selected by the author almost entirely from the five-volume edition of his poems published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company in 1907. A number have been included from the three or four volumes which have been published since the appearance of the Collected Poems; namely, three poems from the volume entitled "Nature Notes and Impressions," E. P. Button & Co., New York; one poem from "The Giant and the Star," Small, Maynard & Co., Boston; Section VII and part of Section VIII of "An Ode" written in commemoration of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and published by John P. Morton & Co., Louisville, Ky.; some five or six poems from "New Poems," published in London by Mr. Grant Richards in 1909; and three or four selections from the volume of selections entitled "Kentucky Poems," compiled by Mr. Edmund Gosse and published in London by Mr. Grant Richards in 19O2. Acknowledgment and thanks for permission to reprint the various poems included in this volume are herewith made to the different publishers.
The two poems, "in Arcady" and "The Black Knight" are new and are published here for the first time.
In making the selections for the present book Mr. Cawein has endeavored to cover the entire field of his poetical labors, which extends over a quarter of a century. With the exception of his dramatic work, as witnessed by one volume only, "The Shadow Garden," a book of plays four in number, published in 1910, the selection herewith presented by us is, in our opinion, representative of the author's poetical work.
The Poetry of Madison Cawein.
Hymn to Spiritual Desire.Beautiful-Bosomed, O Night.Discovery.O Maytime Woods.The Redbird.A Niello.In May.Aubade.Apocalypse.Penetralia.Elusion.Womanhood.The Idyll of the Standing-Stone.Noëra.The Old Spring.A Dreamer of Dreams.Deep in the ForestI. Spring on the Hills.II. Moss and Fern.III. The Thorn Tree.IV. The Hamadryad.Preludes.May.What Little Things.
In the Shadow of the Beeches.Unrequited.The Solitary.A Twilight Moth.The Old Farm.The Whippoorwill.Revealment.Hepaticas.The Wind of Spring.The Catbird.A Woodland Grave.Sunset Dreams.The Old Byway."Below the Sunset's Range of Rose".Music of Summer.Midsummer.The Rain-Crow.Field and Forest Call.Old Homes.The Forest Way.Sunset and Storm.Quiet Lanes.One who loved Nature.Garden Gossip.Assumption.Senorita.Overseas.Problems.To a Windflower.Voyagers.The Spell.Uncertainty.
In the Wood.Since Then.Dusk in the Woods.Paths.The Quest.The Garden of Dreams.The Path to Faery.There are Faeries.The Spirit of the Forest Spring.In a Garden.In the Lane.The Window on the Hill.The Picture.Moly.Poppy and Mandragora.A Road Song.Phantoms.Intimations of the Beautiful.October.Friends.Comradery.Bare Boughs.Days and Days.Autumn Sorrow.The Tree-Toad.The Chipmunk.The Wild Iris.Drouth.Rain.At Sunset.The Leaf-Cricket.The Wind of Winter.
The Owlet.Evening on the Farm.The Locust.The Dead Day.The Old Water-Mill.Argonauts."The Morn that breaks its Heart of Gold".A Voice on the Wind.Requiem.Lynchers.The Parting.Feud.Ku Klux.Eidolons.The Man Hunt.My Romance.A Maid who died Old.Ballad of Low-Lie-Down.Romance.Amadis and Oriana.The Rosicrucian.The Age of Gold.Beauty and Art.The Sea Spirit.Gargaphie.The Dead Oread.The Faun.The Paphian Venus.Oriental Romance.The Mameluke.The Slave.The Portrait.
The Black Knight.In Arcady.Prototypes.March.Dusk.The Winds.Light and Wind.Enchantment.Abandoned.After Long Grief.Mendicants.The End of Summer.November.The Death of Love.Unanswered.The Swashbuckler.Old Sir John.Uncalled.
When a poet begins writing, and we begin liking his work, we own willingly enough that we have not, and cannot have, got the compass of his talent. We must wait till he has written more, and we have learned to like him more, and even then we should hesitate his definition, from all that he has done, if we did not very commonly qualify ourselves from the latest thing he has done. Between the earliest thing and the latest thing there may have been a hundred different things, and in his swan-long life of a singer there would probably be a hundred yet, and all different. But we take the latest as if it summed him up in motive and range and tendency. Many parts of his work offer themselves in confirmation of our judgment, while those which might impeach it shrink away and hide themselves, and leave us to our precipitation, our catastrophe.
It was surely nothing less than by a catastrophe that I should have been so betrayed in the volumes of Mr. Cawein's verse which reached me last before the volume of his collected poems…. I had read his poetry and loved it from the beginning, and in each successive expression of it, I had delighted in its expanding and maturing beauty. I believe I had not failed to own its compass, and when—
"He touched the tender stops of various quills,"
I had responded to every note of the changing music. I did not always respond audibly either in public or in private, for it seemed to me that so old a friend might fairly rest on the laurels he had helped bestow. But when that last volume came, I said to myself, "This applausive silence has gone on long enough. It is time to break it with open appreciation. Still," I said, "I must guard against too great appreciation; I must mix in a little depreciation, to show that I have read attentively, critically, authoritatively." So I applied myself to the cheapest and easiest means of depreciation, and asked, "Why do you always write Nature poems? Why not Human Nature poems?" or the like. But in seizing upon an objection so obvious that I ought to have known it was superficial, I had wronged a poet, who had never done me harm, but only good, in the very terms and conditions of his being a poet. I had not stayed to see that his nature poetry was instinct with human poetry, withhishuman poetry, with mine, with yours. I had made his reproach what ought to have been his finest praise, what is always the praise of poetry when it is not artificial and formal. I ought to have said, as I had seen, that not one of his lovely landscapes in which I could discover no human figure, but thrilled with a human presence penetrating to it from his most sensitive and subtle spirit until it was all but painfully alive with memories, with regrets, with longings, with hopes, with all that from time to time mutably constitutes us men and women, and yet keeps us children. He has the gift, in a measure that I do not think surpassed in any poet, of touching some smallest or commonest thing in nature, and making it live from the manifold associations in which we have our being, and glow thereafter with an inextinguishable beauty. His felicities do not seem sought; rather they seem to seek him, and to surprise him with the delight they impart through him. He has the inspiration of the right word, and the courage of it, so that though in the first instant you may be challenged, you may be revolted, by something that you might have thought uncouth, you are presently overcome by the happy bravery of it, and gladly recognize that no other word of those verbal saints or aristocrats, dedicated to the worship or service of beauty, would at all so well have conveyed the sense of it as this or that plebeian.
If I began indulging myself in the pleasure of quotation, or the delight of giving proofs of what I say, I should soon and far transcend the modest bounds which the editor has set my paper. But the reader may take it from me that no other poet, not even of the great Elizabethan range, can outword this poet when it comes to choosing some epithet fresh from the earth or air, and with the morning sun or light upon it, for an emotion or experience in which the race renews its youth from generation to generation. He is of the kind of Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth and Coleridge, in that truth to observance and experience of nature and the joyous expression of it, which are the dominant characteristics of his art. It is imaginable that the thinness of the social life in the Middle West threw the poet upon the communion with the fields and woods, the days and nights, the changing seasons, in which another great nature poet of ours declares they "speak in various language." But nothing could be farther from the didactic mood in which "communion with the various forms" of nature casts the Puritanic soul of Bryant, than the mood in which this German-blooded, Kentucky-born poet, who keeps throughout his song the sense of a perpetual and inalienable youth, with a spirit as pagan as that which breathes from Greek sculpture—but happily not more pagan. Most modern poets who are antique are rather over-Hellenic, in their wish not to be English or French, but there is nothing voluntary in Mr. Cawein's naturalization in the older world of myth and fable; he is too sincerely and solely a poet to be aposseur;he has his eyes everywhere except on the spectator, and his affair is to report the beauty that he sees, as if there were no one by to hear.
An interesting and charming trait of his poetry is its constant theme of youth and its limit within the range that the emotions and aspirations of youth take. He might indeed be called the poet of youth if he resented being called the poet of nature; but the poet of youth, be it understood, of vague regrets, of "tears, idle tears," of "long, long thoughts," for that is the real youth, and not the youth of the supposed hilarity, the attributive recklessness, the daring hopes. Perhaps there is some such youth as this, but it has not its home in the breast of any young poet, and he rarely utters it; at best he is of a light melancholy, a smiling wistfulness, and upon the whole, October is more to his mind than May.
In Mr. Cawein's work, therefore, what is not the expression of the world we vainly and rashly call the inanimate world, is the hardly more dramatized, and not more enchantingly imagined story of lovers, rather unhappy lovers. He finds his own in this sort far and near; in classic Greece, in heroic England, in romantic Germany, where the blue flower blows, but not less in beautiful and familiar Kentucky, where the blue grass shows itself equally the emblem of poetry, and the moldering log in the cabin wall or the woodland path is of the same poetic value as the marble of the ruined temple or the stone of the crumbling castle. His singularly creative fancy breathes a soul into every scene; his touch leaves everything that was dull to the sense before glowing in the light of joyful recognition. He classifies his poems by different names, and they are of different themes, but they are after all of that unity which I have been trying, all too shirkingly, to suggest. One, for instance, is the pathetic story which tells itself in the lyrical eclogue "One Day and Another." It is the conversation, prolonged from meeting to meeting, between two lovers whom death parts; but who recurrently find themselves and each other in the gardens and the woods, and on the waters which they tell each other of and together delight in. The effect is that which is truest to youth and love, for these transmutations of emotion form the disguise of self which makes passion tolerable; but mechanically the result is a series of nature poems. More genuinely dramatic are such pieces as "The Feud," "Ku Klux," and "The Lynchers," three out of many; but one which I value more because it is worthy of Wordsworth, or of Tennyson in a Wordsworthian mood, is "The Old Mill," where, with all the wonted charm of his landscape art, Mr. Cawein gives us a strongly local and novel piece of character painting.
I deny myself with increasing reluctance the pleasure of quoting the stanzas, the verses, the phrases, the epithets, which lure me by scores and hundreds in his poems. It must suffice me to say that I do not know any poem of his which has not some such a felicity; I do not know any poem of his which is not worth reading, at least the first time, and often the second and the third time, and so on as often as you have the chance of recurring to it. Some disappoint and others delight more than others; but there is none but in greater or less measure has the witchery native to the poet, and his place and his period.
It is only in order of his later time that I would put Mr. Cawein first among those Midwestern poets, of whom he is the youngest. Poetry in the Middle West has had its development in which it was eclipsed by the splendor, transitory if not vain, of the California school. But it is deeply rooted in the life of the region, and is as true to its origins as any faithful portraiture of the Midwestern landscape could be; you could not mistake the source of the poem or the picture. In a certain tenderness of light and coloring, the poems would recall the mellowed masterpieces of the older literatures rather than those of the New England school, where conscience dwells almost rebukingly with beauty….
FromThe North American Review. Copyright, 1908, by the North AmericanReview Publishing Company.
Mother of visions, with lineaments dulcet as numbersBreathed on the eyelids of Love by music that slumbers,Secretly, sweetly, O presence of fire and snow,Thou comest mysterious,In beauty imperious,Clad on with dreams and the light of no world that we know:Deep to my innermost soul am I shaken,Helplessly shaken and tossed,And of thy tyrannous yearnings so utterly taken,My lips, unsatisfied, thirst;Mine eyes are accurstWith longings for visions that far in the night are forsaken;And mine ears, in listening lost,Yearn, waiting the note of a chord that will never awaken.
Like palpable music thou comest, like moonlight; and far,—Resonant bar upon bar,—The vibrating lyreOf the spirit responds with melodious fire,As thy fluttering fingers now grasp it and ardently shake,With laughter and ache,The chords of existence, the instrument star-sprung,Whose frame is of clay, so wonderfully molded of mire.
Vested with vanquishment, come, O Desire, Desire!Breathe in this harp of my soul the audible angel of Love!Make of my heart an Israfel burning above,A lute for the music of God, that lips, which are mortal, but stammer!Smite every rapturous wireWith golden delirium, rebellion and silvery clamor,Crying—"Awake! awake!Too long hast thou slumbered! too far from the regions of glamourWith its mountains of magic, its fountains of faery, the spar-sprung,Hast thou wandered away, O Heart!"
Come, oh, come and partakeOf necromance banquets of Beauty; and slakeThy thirst in the waters of Art,That are drawn from the streamsOf love and of dreams.
"Come, oh, come!No longer shall language be dumb!Thy vision shall grasp—As one doth the glittering haspOf a sword made splendid with gems and with gold—The wonder and richness of life, not anguish and hate of it merely.And out of the starkEternity, awful and dark,Immensity silent and cold,—Universe-shaking as trumpets, or cymbaling metals,Imperious; yet pensive and pearlyAnd soft as the rosy unfolding of petals,Or crumbling aroma of blossoms that wither too early,—The majestic music of God, where He playsOn the organ, eternal and vast, of eons and days."
Beautiful-bosomed, O Night, in thy noonMove with majesty onward! soaring, as lightlyAs a singer may soar the notes of an exquisite tune,The stars and the moonThrough the clerestories high of the heaven, the firmament's halls:Under whose sapphirine walls,June, hesperian June,Robed in divinity wanders. Daily and nightlyThe turquoise touch of her robe, that the violets star,The silvery fall of her feet, that lilies are,Fill the land with languorous light and perfume.—Is it the melody mute of burgeoning leaf and of bloom?The music of Nature, that silently shapes in the gloomImmaterial hostsOf spirits that have the flowers and leaves in their keep,Whom I hear, whom I hear?With their sighs of silver and pearl?Invisible ghosts,—Each sigh a shadowy girl,—
Who whisper in leaves and glimmer in blossoms and hoverIn color and fragrance and loveliness, breathed from the deepWorld-soul of the mother,Nature; who over and over,—Both sweetheart and lover,—Goes singing her songs from one sweet month to the other.
Lo! 'tis her songs that appear, appear,In forest and field, on hill-land and lea,As visible harmony,Materialized melody,Crystallized beauty, that out of the atmosphereUtters itself, in wonder and mystery,Peopling with glimmering essence the hyaline far and the near….
Behold how it sprouts from the grass and blossoms from flower and tree!In waves of diaphanous moonlight and mist,In fugue upon fugue of gold and of amethyst,Around me, above me it spirals; now slower, now faster,Like symphonies born of the thought of a musical master.—O music of Earth! O God, who the music inspired!Let me breathe of the life of thy breath!And so be fulfilled and attiredIn resurrection, triumphant o'er time and o'er death!
What is it now that I shall seekWhere woods dip downward, in the hills?—A mossy nook, a ferny creek,And May among the daffodils.
Or in the valley's vistaed glow,Past rocks of terraced trumpet vines,Shall I behold her coming slow,Sweet May, among the columbines?
With redbud cheeks and bluet eyes,Big eyes, the homes of happiness,To meet me with the old surprise,Her wild-rose hair all bonnetless.
Who waits for me, where, note for note,The birds make glad the forest trees?—A dogwood blossom at her throat,My May among th' anemones.
As sweetheart breezes kiss the blooms,And dews caress the moon's pale beams,My soul shall drink her lips' perfumes,And know the magic of her dreams.
From the idyll "Wild Thorn and Lily"
O Maytime woods! O Maytime lanes and hours!And stars, that knew how often there at nightBeside the path, where woodbine odors blewBetween the drowsy eyelids of the dusk,—When, like a great, white, pearly moth, the moonHung silvering long windows of your room,—I stood among the shrubs! The dark house slept.I watched and waited for—I know not what!—Some tremor of your gown: a velvet leaf'sUnfolding to caresses of the Spring:The rustle of your footsteps: or the dewSyllabling avowal on a tulip's lipsOf odorous scarlet: or the whispered wordOf something lovelier than new leaf or rose—The word young lips half murmur in a dream:
Serene with sleep, light visions weigh her eyes:And underneath her window blooms a quince.The night is a sultana who doth riseIn slippered caution, to admit a prince,Love, who her eunuchs and her lord defies.
Are these her dreams? or is it that the breezePelts me with petals of the quince, and liftsThe Balm-o'-Gilead buds? and seems to squeezeAroma on aroma through sweet riftsOf Eden, dripping through the rainy trees.
Along the path the buckeye trees beginTo heap their hills of blossoms.—Oh, that theyWere Romeo ladders, whereby I might winHer chamber's sanctity!—where dreams must prayAbout her soul!—That I might enter in!—
A dream,—and see the balsam scent eraseIts dim intrusion; and the starry nightConclude majestic pomp; the virgin graceOf every bud abashed before the white,Pure passion-flower of her sleeping face.
From "Wild Thorn and Lily"
Among the white haw-blossoms, where the creekDroned under drifts of dogwood and of haw,The redbird, like a crimson blossom blownAgainst the snow-white bosom of the Spring,The chaste confusion of her lawny breast,Sang on, prophetic of serener days,As confident as June's completer hours.And I stood listening like a hind, who hearsA wood nymph breathing in a forest fluteAmong the beech-boles of myth-haunted ways:And when it ceased, the memory of the airBlew like a syrinx in my brain: I madeA lyric of the notes that men might know:
He flies with flirt and fluting—As flies a crimson starFrom flaming star-beds shooting—From where the roses are.
Wings past and sings; and sevenNotes, wild as fragrance is,—That turn to flame in heaven,—Float round him full of bliss.
He sings; each burning featherThrills, throbbing at his throat;A song of firefly weather,And of a glowworm boat:
Of Elfland and a princessWho, born of a perfume,His music rocks,—where wincesThat rosebud's cradled bloom.
No bird sings half so airy,No bird of dusk or dawn,Thou masking King of Faery!Thou red-crowned Oberon!
It is not early spring and yetOf bloodroot blooms along the stream,And blotted banks of violet,My heart will dream.
Is it because the windflower apesThe beauty that was once her brow,That the white memory of it shapesThe April now?
Because the wild-rose wears the blushThat once made sweet her maidenhood,Its thought makes June of barren bushAnd empty wood?
And then I think how young she died—Straight, barren Death stalks down the trees,The hard-eyed Hours by his side,That kill and freeze.
When orchards are in bloom againMy heart will bound, my blood will beat,To hear the redbird so repeat,On boughs of rosy stain,His blithe, loud song,—like some far strainFrom out the past,—among the bloom,—(Where bee and wasp and hornet boom)—Fresh, redolent of rain.
When orchards are in bloom once more,Invasions of lost dreams will drawMy feet, like some insistent law,Through blossoms to her door:In dreams I'll ask her, as before,To let me help her at the well;And fill her pail; and long to tellMy love as once of yore.
I shall not speak until we quitThe farm-gate, leading to the laneAnd orchard, all in bloom again,Mid which the bluebirds sitAnd sing; and through whose blossoms flitThe catbirds crying while they fly:Then tenderly I'll speak, and tryTo tell her all of it.
And in my dream again she'll placeHer hand in mine, as oft before,—When orchards are in bloom once more,—With all her young-girl grace:And we shall tarry till a traceOf sunset dyes the heav'ns; and then—We'll part; and, parting, I againShall bend and kiss her face.
And homeward, singing, I shall goAlong the cricket-chirring ways,While sunset, one long crimson blazeOf orchards, lingers low:And my dead youth again I'll know,And all her love, when spring is here—Whose memory holds me many a year,Whose love still haunts me so!
I would not die when Springtime liftsThe white world to her maiden mouth,And heaps its cradle with gay gifts,Breeze-blown from out the singing South:Too full of life and loves that cling;Too heedless of all mortal woe,The young, unsympathetic Spring,That Death should never know.
I would not die when Summer shakesHer daisied locks below her hips,And naked as a star that takesA cloud, into the silence slips:Too rich is Summer; poor in needs;In egotism of lovelinessHer pomp goes by, and never heedsOne life the more or less.
But I would die when Autumn goes,The dark rain dripping from her hair,Through forests where the wild wind blowsDeath and the red wreck everywhere:Sweet as love's last farewells and tearsTo fall asleep when skies are gray,In the old autumn of my years,Like a dead leaf borne far away.
When you and I in the hills went Maying,You and I in the bright May weather,The birds, that sang on the boughs together,There in the green of the woods, kept sayingAll that my heart was saying low,"I love you! love you!" soft and low,—And did you know?When you and I in the hills went Maying.
There where the brook on its rocks went winking,There by its banks where the May had led us,Flowers, that bloomed in the woods and meadows,Azure and gold at our feet, kept thinkingAll that my soul was thinking there,"I love you! love you!" softly there—And did you care?There where the brook on its rocks went winking.
Whatever befalls through fate's compelling,Should our paths unite or our pathways sever,In the Mays to come I shall feel foreverThe wildflowers thinking, the wild birds telling,In words as soft as the falling dew,The love that I keep here still for you,Both deep and true,Whatever befalls through fate's compelling.
Awake! the dawn is on the hills!Behold, at her cool throat a rose,Blue-eyed and beautiful she goes,Leaving her steps in daffodils.—Awake! arise! and let me seeThine eyes, whose deeps epitomizeAll dawns that were or are to be,O love, all Heaven in thine eyes!—Awake! arise! come down to me!
Behold! the dawn is up: behold!How all the birds around her float,Wild rills of music, note on note,Spilling the air with mellow gold.—Arise! awake! and, drawing near,Let me but hear thee and rejoice!Thou, who keep'st captive, sweet and clear,All song, O love, within thy voice!Arise! awake! and let me hear!
See, where she comes, with limbs of day,The dawn! with wild-rose hands and feet,Within whose veins the sunbeams beat,And laughters meet of wind and ray.Arise! come down! and, heart to heart,Love, let me clasp in thee all these—The sunbeam, of which thou art part,And all the rapture of the breeze!—Arise! come down! loved that thou art!
Before I found her I had foundWithin my heart, as in a brook,Reflections of her: now a soundOf imaged beauty; now a look.
So when I found her, gazing inThose Bibles of her eyes, aboveAll earth, I read no word of sin;Their holy chapters all were love.
I read them through. I read and sawThe soul impatient of the sod—Her soul, that through her eyes did drawMine—to the higher love of God.
I am a part of all you seeIn Nature; part of all you feel:I am the impact of the beeUpon the blossom; in the treeI am the sap,—that shall revealThe leaf, the bloom,—that flows and flutesUp from the darkness through its roots.
I am the vermeil of the rose,The perfume breathing in its veins;The gold within the mist that glowsAlong the west and overflowsWith light the heaven; the dew that rainsIts freshness down and strings with spheresOf wet the webs and oaten ears.
I am the egg that folds the bird;The song that beaks and breaks its shell;The laughter and the wandering wordThe water says; and, dimly heard,The music of the blossom's bellWhen soft winds swing it; and the soundOf grass slow-creeping o'er the ground.
I am the warmth, the honey-scentThat throats with spice each lily-budThat opens, white with wonderment,Beneath the moon; or, downward bent,Sleeps with a moth beneath its hood:I am the dream that haunts it too,That crystallizes into dew.
I am the seed within the pod;The worm within its closed cocoon:The wings within the circling clod,The germ, that gropes through soil and sodTo beauty, radiant in the noon:I am all these, behold! and more—I am the love at the world-heart's core.
My soul goes out to her who says,"Come, follow me and cast off care!"Then tosses back her sun-bright hair,And like a flower before me swaysBetween the green leaves and my gaze:This creature like a girl, who smilesInto my eyes and softly laysHer hand in mine and leads me miles,Long miles of haunted forest ways.
Sometimes she seems a faint perfume,A fragrance that a flower exhaledAnd God gave form to; now, unveiled,A sunbeam making gold the gloomOf vines that roof some woodland roomOf boughs; and now the silvery soundOf streams her presence doth assume—Music, from which, in dreaming drowned,A crystal shape she seems to bloom.
Sometimes she seems the light that liesOn foam of waters where the fernShimmers and drips; now, at some turnOf woodland, bright against the skies,She seems the rainbowed mist that flies;And now the mossy fire that breaksBeneath the feet in azure eyesOf flowers; now the wind that shakesPale petals from the bough that sighs.
Sometimes she lures me with a song;Sometimes she guides me with a laugh;Her white hand is a magic staff,Her look a spell to lead me long:Though she be weak and I be strong,She needs but shake her happy hair,But glance her eyes, and, right or wrong,My soul must follow—anywhereShe wills—far from the world's loud throng.
Sometimes I think that she must beNo part of earth, but merely this—The fair, elusive thing we missIn Nature, that we dream we seeYet never see: that goldenlyBeckons; that, limbed with rose and pearl,The Greek made a divinity:—A nymph, a god, a glimmering girl,That haunts the forest's mystery.
The summer takes its hueFrom something opulent as fair in her,And the bright heaven is brighter than it was;Brighter and lovelier,Arching its beautiful blue,Serene and soft, as her sweet gaze, o'er us.
The springtime takes its moodsFrom something in her made of smiles and tears,And flowery earth is flowerier than before,And happier, it appears,Adding new multitudesTo flowers, like thoughts, that haunt us evermore.
Summer and spring are wedIn her—her nature; and the glamour ofTheir loveliness, their bounty, as it were,Of life and joy and love,Her being seems to shed,—The magic aura of the heart of her.
The teasel and the horsemint spreadThe hillside as with sunset, sownWith blossoms, o'er the Standing-StoneThat ripples in its rocky bed:There are no treasuries that holdGold richer than the marigoldThat crowns its sparkling head.
'Tis harvest time: a mower standsAmong the morning wheat and whetsHis scythe, and for a space forgetsThe labor of the ripening lands;Then bends, and through the dewy grainHis long scythe hisses, and againHe swings it in his hands.
And she beholds him where he mowsOn acres whence the water sendsFaint music of reflecting bendsAnd falls that interblend with flows:She stands among the old bee-gums,—Where all the apiary hums,—A simple bramble-rose.
She hears him whistling as he leans,And, reaping, sweeps the ripe wheat by;She sighs and smiles, and knows not why,Nor what her heart's disturbance means:He whets his scythe, and, resting, seesHer rose-like 'mid the hives of bees,Beneath the flowering beans.
The peacock-purple lizard creepsAlong the rail; and deep the droneOf insects makes the country loneWith summer where the water sleeps:She hears him singing as he swingsHis scythe—who thinks of other thingsThan toil, and, singing, reaps.
Noëra, when sad FallHas grayed the fallow;Leaf-cramped the wood-brook's brawlIn pool and shallow;When, by the woodside, tallStands sere the mallow.
Noëra, when gray goldAnd golden grayThe crackling hollows foldBy every way,Shall I thy face behold,Dear bit of May?
When webs are cribs for dew,And gossamersStreak by you, silver-blue;When silence stirsOne leaf, of rusty hue,Among the burrs:
Noëra, through the wood,Or through the grain,Come, with the hoiden moodOf wind and rainFresh in thy sunny blood,Sweetheart, again.
Noëra, when the corn,Reaped on the fields,The asters' stars adorn;And purple shieldsOf ironweeds lie tornAmong the wealds:
Noëra, haply then,Thou being with me,Each ruined greenwood glenWill bud and beSpring's with the spring again,The spring in thee.
Thou of the breezy tread;Feet of the breeze:Thou of the sunbeam head;Heart like a bee's:Face like a woodland-bredAnemone's.
Thou to October bringAn April part!Come! make the wild birds sing,The blossoms start!Noëra, with the springWild in thy heart!
Come with our golden year:Come as its gold:With the same laughing, clear,Loved voice of old:In thy cool hair one dearWild marigold.
Under rocks whereon the roseLike a streak of morning glows;Where the azure-throated newtDrowses on the twisted root;And the brown bees, humming homeward,Stop to suck the honeydew;Fern- and leaf-hid, gleaming gloamward,Drips the wildwood spring I knew,Drips the spring my boyhood knew.
Myrrh and music everywhereHaunt its cascades—like the hairThat a Naiad tosses cool,Swimming strangely beautiful,With white fragrance for her bosom,And her mouth a breath of song—Under leaf and branch and blossomFlows the woodland spring along,Sparkling, singing flows along.
Still the wet wan mornings touchIts gray rocks, perhaps; and suchSlender stars as dusk may havePierce the rose that roofs its wave;Still the thrush may call at noontideAnd the whippoorwill at night;Nevermore, by sun or moontide,Shall I see it gliding white,Falling, flowing, wild and white.
He lived beyond men, and so stoodAdmitted to the brotherhoodOf beauty:—dreams, with which he trodCompanioned like some sylvan god.And oft men wondered, when his thoughtMade all their knowledge seem as naught,If he, like Uther's mystic son,Had not been born for Avalon.
When wandering mid the whispering trees,His soul communed with every breeze;Heard voices calling from the glades,Bloom-words of the Leimoniäds;Or Dryads of the ash and oak,Who syllabled his name and spokeWith him of presences and powersThat glimpsed in sunbeams, gloomed in showers.
By every violet-hallowed brook,Where every bramble-matted nookRippled and laughed with water sounds,He walked like one on sainted grounds,Fearing intrusion on the spellThat kept some fountain-spirit's well,Or woodland genius, sitting whereRed, racy berries kissed his hair.
Once when the wind, far o'er the hill,Had fall'n and left the wildwood stillFor Dawn's dim feet to trail across,—Beneath the gnarled boughs, on the moss,The air around him golden-ripeWith daybreak,—there, with oaten pipe,His eyes beheld the wood-god, Pan,Goat-bearded, horned; half brute, half man;Who, shaggy-haunched, a savage rhymeBlew in his reed to rudest time;And swollen-jowled, with rolling eye—Beneath the slowly silvering sky,Whose rose streaked through the forest's roof—Danced, while beneath his boisterous hoofThe branch was snapped, and, interfusedBetween gnarled roots, the moss was bruised.
And often when he wandered throughOld forests at the fall of dew—A new Endymion, who soughtA beauty higher than all thought—Some night, men said, most surely heWould favored be of deity:That in the holy solitudeHer sudden presence, long-pursued,Unto his gaze would stand confessed:The awful moonlight of her breastCome, high with majesty, and holdHis heart's blood till his heart grew cold,Unpulsed, unsinewed, all undone,And snatch his soul to Avalon.
Ah, shall I follow, on the hills,The Spring, as wild wings follow?Where wild-plum trees make wan the hills,Crabapple trees the hollow,Haunts of the bee and swallow?
In redbud brakes and floweryAcclivities of berry;In dogwood dingles, showeryWith white, where wrens make merry?Or drifts of swarming cherry?
In valleys of wild strawberries,And of the clumped May-apple;Or cloudlike trees of haw-berries,With which the south winds grapple,That brook and byway dapple?
With eyes of far forgetfulness,—Like some wild wood-thing's daughter,Whose feet are beelike fretfulness,—To see her run like waterThrough boughs that slipped or caught her.
O Spring, to seek, yet find you not!To search, yet never win you!To glimpse, to touch, but bind you not!To lose, and still continue,All sweet evasion in you!
In pearly, peach-blush distancesYou gleam; the woods are braidedOf myths; of dream-existences….There, where the brook is shaded,A sudden splendor faded.
O presence, like the primrose's,Again I feel your power!With rainy scents of dim roses,Like some elusive flower,Who led me for an hour!
Where rise the brakes of bramble there,Wrapped with the trailing rose;Through cane where waters ramble, thereWhere deep the sword-grass grows,Who knows?Perhaps, unseen of eyes of man,Hides Pan.
Perhaps the creek, whose pebbles makeA foothold for the mint,May bear,—where soft its trebles makeConfession,—some vague hint,(The print,Goat-hoofed, of one who lightly ran,)Of Pan.
Where, in the hollow of the hillsFerns deepen to the knees,What sounds are those above the hills,And now among the trees?—No breeze!—The syrinx, haply, none may scan,Of Pan.
In woods where waters break uponThe hush like some soft word;Where sun-shot shadows shake uponThe moss, who has not heard—No bird!—The flute, as breezy as a fan,Of Pan?
Far in, where mosses lay for usStill carpets, cool and plush;Where bloom and branch and ray for usSleep, waking with a rush—The hushBut sounds the satyr hoof a spanOf Pan.
O woods,—whose thrushes sing to us,Whose brooks dance sparkling heels;Whose wild aromas cling to us,—While here our wonder kneels,Who stealsUpon us, brown as bark with tan,But Pan?
The night is sad with silver and the day is glad with gold,And the woodland silence listens to a legend never old,Of the Lady of the Fountain, whom the faery people know,With her limbs of samite whiteness and her hair of golden glow,Whom the boyish South Wind seeks for and the girlish-stepping Rain;Whom the sleepy leaves still whisper men shall never see again:She whose Vivien charms were mistress of the magic Merlin knew,That could change the dew to glowworms and the glowworms into dew.There's a thorn tree in the forest, and the faeries know the tree,With its branches gnarled and wrinkled as a face with sorcery;But the Maytime brings it clusters of a rainy fragrant white,Like the bloom-bright brows of beauty or a hand of lifted light.And all day the silence whispers to the sun-ray of the mornHow the bloom is lovely Vivien and how Merlin is the thorn:How she won the doting wizard with her naked lovelinessTill he told her dæmon secrets that must make his magic less.
How she charmed him and enchanted in the thorn-tree's thorns to lieForever with his passion that should never dim or die:And with wicked laughter looking on this thing which she had done,Like a visible aroma lingered sparkling in the sun:How she stooped to kiss the pathos of an elf-lock of his beard,In a mockery of parting and mock pity of his weird:But her magic had forgotten that "who bends to give a kissWill but bring the curse upon them of the person whose it is":So the silence tells the secret.—And at night the faeries seeHow the tossing bloom is Vivien, who is struggling to be free,In the thorny arms of Merlin, who forever is the tree.
She stood among the longest fernsThe valley held; and in her handOne blossom, like the light that burnsVermilion o'er a sunset land;And round her hair a twisted bandOf pink-pierced mountain-laurel blooms:And darker than dark pools, that stand
Below the star-communing glooms,Her eyes beneath her hair's perfumes.
I saw the moonbeam sandals onHer flowerlike feet, that seemed too chasteTo tread true gold: and, like the dawnOn splendid peaks that lord a wasteOf solitude lost gods have graced,Her face: she stood there, faultless-hipped,Bound as with cestused silver,—chasedWith acorn-cup and crown, and tippedWith oak leaves,—whence her chiton slipped.
Limbs that the gods call loveliness!—The grace and glory of all GreeceWrought in one marble shape were lessThan her perfection!—'Mid the treesI saw her—and time seemed to ceaseFor me.—And, lo! I lived my oldGreek life again of classic ease,Barbarian as the myths that rolledMe back into the Age of Gold.
There is no rhyme that is half so sweetAs the song of the wind in the rippling wheat;There is no metre that's half so fineAs the lilt of the brook under rock and vine;And the loveliest lyric I ever heardWas the wildwood strain of a forest bird.—If the wind and the brook and the bird would teachMy heart their beautiful parts of speech,And the natural art that they say these with,My soul would sing of beauty and mythIn a rhyme and metre that none beforeHave sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore,And the world would be richer one poet the more.
A thought to lift me up to thoseSweet wildflowers of the pensive woods;The lofty, lowly attitudesOf bluet and of bramble-rose:To lift me where my mind may reachThe lessons which their beauties teach.
A dream, to lead my spirit onWith sounds of faery shawms and flutes,And all mysterious attributesOf 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 guestOf happiness whose soul is love;One with the life that knoweth ofBut song that turneth toil to rest:To make me cousin to the birds,Whose music needs not wisdom's words.
The golden discs of the rattlesnake-weed,That spangle the woods and dance—No gleam of gold that the twilights holdIs strong as their necromance:For, under the oaks where the woodpaths lead,The golden discs of the rattlesnake-weedAre the May's own utterance.
The azure stars of the bluet bloom,That sprinkle the woodland's trance—No blink of blue that a cloud lets throughIs sweet as their countenance:For, over the knolls that the woods perfume,The azure stars of the bluet bloomAre the light of the May's own glance.
With her wondering words and her looks she comes,In a sunbeam of a gown;She needs but think and the blossoms wink,But look, and they shower down.By orchard ways, where the wild bee hums,With her wondering words and her looks she comesLike a little maid to town.
From "One Day and Another"
What little things are thoseThat hold our happiness!A smile, a glance, a roseDropped from her hair or dress;A word, a look, a touch,—These are so much, so much.
An air we can't forget;A sunset's gold that gleams;A spray of mignonette,Will fill the soul with dreamsMore than all history says,Or romance of old days.
For of the human heart,Not brain, is memory;These things it makes a partOf its own entity;The joys, the pains whereofAre the very food of love.
In the shadow of the beeches,Where the fragile wildflowers bloom;Where the pensive silence pleachesGreen a roof of cool perfume,Have you felt an awe imperiousAs when, in a church, mysteriousWindows paint with God the gloom?
In the shadow of the beeches,Where the rock-ledged waters flow;Where the sun's slant splendor bleachesEvery wave to foaming snow,Have you felt a music solemnAs when minster arch and columnEcho organ worship low?
In the shadow of the beeches,Where the light and shade are blent;Where the forest bird beseeches,And the breeze is brimmed with scent,—Is it joy or melancholyThat o'erwhelms us partly, wholly,To our spirit's betterment?
In the shadow of the beechesLay me where no eye perceives;Where,—like some great arm that reachesGently as a love that grieves,—One gnarled root may clasp me kindly,While the long years, working blindly,Slowly change my dust to leaves.
Passion? not hers! who held me with pure eyes:One hand among the deep curls of her brow,I drank the girlhood of her gaze with sighs:She never sighed, nor gave me kiss or vow.
So have I seen a clear October pool,Cold, liquid topaz, set within the sereGold of the woodland, tremorless and cool,Reflecting all the heartbreak of the year.
Sweetheart? not she! whose voice was music-sweet;Whose face loaned language to melodious prayer.Sweetheart I called her.—When did she repeatSweet to one hope, or heart to one despair!
So have I seen a wildflower's fragrant headSung to and sung to by a longing bird;And at the last, albeit the bird lay dead,No blossom wilted, for it had not heard.
Upon the mossed rock by the springShe sits, forgetful of her pail,Lost in remote rememberingOf that which may no more avail.
Her thin, pale hair is dimly dressedAbove a brow lined deep with care,The color of a leaf long pressed,A faded leaf that once was fair.
You may not know her from the stoneSo still she sits who does not stir,Thinking of this one thing alone—The love that never came to her.
Dusk is thy dawn; when Eve puts on its stateOf gold and purple in the marbled west,Thou comest forth like some embodied trait,Or dim conceit, a lily bud confessed;Or of a rose the visible wish; that, white,Goes softly messengering through the night,Whom each expectant flower makes its guest.
All day the primroses have thought of thee,Their golden heads close-haremed from the heat;All day the mystic moonflowers silkenlyVeiled snowy faces,—that no bee might greet,Or butterfly that, weighed with pollen, passed;—Keeping Sultana charms for thee, at last,Their lord, who comest to salute each sweet.
Cool-throated flowers that avoid the day'sToo fervid kisses; every bud that drinksThe tipsy dew and to the starlight playsNocturnes of fragrance, thy wing'd shadow linksIn bonds of secret brotherhood and faith;O bearer of their order's shibboleth,Like some pale symbol fluttering o'er these pinks.
What dost them whisper in the balsam's earThat sets it blushing, or the hollyhock's,—A syllabled silence that no man may hear,—As dreamily upon its stem it rocks?What spell dost bear from listening plant to plant,Like some white witch, some ghostly ministrant,Some specter of some perished flower of phlox?
O voyager of that universe which liesBetween the four walls of this garden fair,—Whose constellations are the firefliesThat wheel their instant courses everywhere,—Mid faery firmaments wherein one seesMimic Boötes and the Pleiades,Thou steerest like some faery ship of air.
Gnome-wrought of moonbeam-fluff and gossamer,Silent as scent, perhaps thou chariotestMab or King Oberon; or, haply, herHis queen, Titania, on some midnight quest.—Oh for the herb, the magic euphrasy,That should unmask thee to mine eyes, ah me!And all that world at which my soul hath guessed!
Dormered and verandaed, cool,Locust-girdled, on the hill;Stained with weather-wear, and dull-Streak'd with lichens; every sillThresholding the beautiful;
I can see it standing there,Brown above the woodland deep,Wrapped in lights of lavender,By the warm wind rocked asleep,Violet shadows everywhere.
I remember how the Spring,Liberal-lapped, bewildered itsAcred orchards, murmuring,Kissed to blossom; budded bitsWhere the wood-thrush came to sing.
Barefoot Spring, at first who trod,Like a beggermaid, adownThe wet woodland; where the god,With the bright sun for a crownAnd the firmament for rod,
Met her; clothed her; wedded her;Her Cophetua: when, lo!All the hill, one breathing blur,Burst in beauty; gleam and glowBlent with pearl and lavender.
Seckel, blackheart, palpitantRained their bleaching strays; and whiteSnowed the damson, bent aslant;Rambow-tree and romaniteSeemed beneath deep drifts to pant.
And it stood there, brown and gray,In the bee-boom and the bloom,In the shadow and the ray,In the passion and perfume,Grave as age among the gay.
Wild with laughter romped the clearBoyish voices round its walls;Rare wild-roses were the dearGirlish faces in its halls,Music-haunted all the year.
Far before it meadows fullOf green pennyroyal sank;Clover-dotted as with woolHere and there; with now a bankHot of color; and the cool
Dark-blue shadows unconfinedOf the clouds rolled overhead:Clouds, from which the summer windBlew with rain, and freshly shedDew upon the flowerkind.
Where through mint and gypsy-lilyRuns the rocky brook away,Musical among the hillySolitudes,—its flashing spraySunlight-dashed or forest-stilly,—
Buried in deep sassafras,Memory follows up the hillStill some cowbell's mellow brass,Where the ruined water-millLooms, half-hid in cane and grass….
Oh, the farmhouse! is it setOn the hilltop still? 'mid muskOf the meads? where, violet,Deepens all the dreaming dusk,And the locust-trees hang wet.
While the sunset, far and low,On its westward windows dashesPrimrose or pomegranate glow;And above, in glimmering splashes,Lilac stars the heavens sow.
Sleeps it still among its roses,—Oldtime roses? while the choirOf the lonesome insects dozes:And the white moon, drifting higher,O'er its mossy roof reposes—Sleeps it still among its roses?