Deserted

THE old house leans upon a tree

Like some old man upon a staff:

The night wind in its ancient porch

Sounds like a hollow laugh.

The heaven is wrapped in flying clouds

As grandeur cloaks itself in gray:

The starlight flitting in and out,

Glints like a lanthorn ray.

The dark is full of whispers. Now

A fox-hound howls: and through the night,

Like some old ghost from out its grave,

The moon comes misty white.

Madison Cawein

Before the Rain

BEFORE the rain, low in the obscure east,

     Weak and morose the moon hung, sickly gray;

Around its disc the storm mists, cracked and creased,

     Wove an enormous web, wherein it lay

     Like some white spider hungry for its prey.

Vindictive looked the scowling firmament,

     In which each star, that flashed a dagger ray,

Seemed filled with malice of some dark intent.

The marsh-frog croaked; and underneath the stone

     The peevish cricket raised a creaking cry.

Within the world these sounds were heard alone,

     Save when the ruffian wind swept from the sky,

     Making each tree like some sad spirit sigh;

Or shook the clumsy beetle from its weed,

     That, in the drowsy darkness, bungling by,

Sharded the silence with its feverish speed.

Slowly the tempest gathered. Hours passed

     Before was heard the thunder's sullen drum

Rumbling night's hollow; and the Earth at last,

     Restless with waiting,--like a woman, dumb

     With doubting of the love that should have clomb

Her casement hours ago,---avowed again,

     'Mid protestations, joy that he had come.

And all night long I heard the Heavens explain.

Madison Cawein

After Rain

BEHOLD the blossom-bosomed Day again,

With all the star-white Hours in her train,

Laughs out of pearl-lights through a golden ray,

That, leaning on the woodland wildness, blends

A sprinkled amber with the showers that lay

Their oblong emeralds on the leafy ends.

Behold her bend with maiden-braided brows

Above the wildflower, sidewise with its strain

Of dewy happiness, to kiss again

Each drop to death; or, under rainy boughs,

With fingers, fragrant as the woodland rain,

Gather the sparkles from the sycamore,

          To set within each core

Of crimson roses girdling her hips,

Where each bud dreams and drips.

Smoothing her blue-black hair,--where many a tusk

Of iris flashes,--like the falchions' sheen

Of Faery 'round blue banners of its Queen,--

Is it a Naiad singing in the dusk,

That haunts the spring, where all the moss is musk

With footsteps of the flowers on the banks?

Or just a wild-bird voluble with thanks?

Balm for each blade of grass: the Hours prepare

A festival each weed's invited to.

Each bee is drunken with the honied air:

And all the air is eloquent with blue.

The wet hay glitters, and the harvester

Tinkles his scythe,--as twinkling as the dew,--

          That shall not spare

Blossom or brier in its sweeping path;

          And, ere it cut one swath,

Rings them they die, and tells them to prepare.

What is the spice that haunts each glen and glade?

A Dryad's lips, who slumbers in the shade?

A Faun, who lets the heavy ivy-wreath

Slip to his thigh as, reaching up, he pulls

The chestnut blossoms in whole bosomfuls?

A sylvan Spirit, whose sweet mouth doth breathe

Her viewless presence near us, unafraid?

Or troops of ghosts of blooms, that whitely wade

The brook? whose wisdom knows no other song

Than that the bird sings where it builds beneath

The wild-rose and sits singing all day long.

Oh, let me sit with silence for a space,

A little while forgetting that fierce part

Of man that struggles in the toiling mart;

Where God can look into my heart's own heart

From unsoiled heights made amiable with grace;

And where the sermons that the old oaks keep

Can steal into me.--And what better then

Than, turning to the moss a quiet face,

To fall asleep? a little while to sleep

And dream of wiser worlds and wiser men.

Madison Cawein

The Haunted House

     I

THE shadows sit and stand about its door

Like uninvited guests and poor;

And all the long, hot summer day

The grating locust dins its roundelay

In one old sycamore.

The squirrel leaves upon its rotting roof,

In empty hulls, its tracks;

And in its clapboard cracks

The spider weaves a windy woof;

Its cells the mud-wasp packs.

The she-fox whelps upon its floor;

The owlet roosts above its door;

And where the musty mosses run,

The freckled snake basks in the sun.

     II

The children of what fathers sleep

Beneath these melancholy pines?

The slow slugs crawl among their graves where creep

The doddered poison-vines.

The orchard, near the meadow deep,

Lifts up decrepit arms,

Gray-lichened in a withering heap.

No sap swells up to make it leap

As once in calms and storms;

No blossom lulls its age asleep;

Each breeze brings sad alarms.

Big, bell-round pears and apples, russet-red,

No maiden gathers now;

The worm-bored trunks weep gum, like tears, instead,

From each decaying bough.

     III

The woodlands around it are solitary

And fold it like gaunt hands;

The sunlight is sad and the moonlight is dreary,

And the hum of the country is weary, so weary!

And the bees go by in bands

To other lovelier lands.

The grasses are rotting in walk and in bower;

The lonesomeness,--dank and rank

As a chamber where lies for a lonely hour

An old-man's corpse with many a flower,--

Is hushed and blank.

And even the birds have passed it by,

To sing their songs to a happier sky,

A happier sky and bank.

     IV

In its desolate halls are lying,

Gold, blood-red and browned,

Drifted leaves of summer dying;

And the winds, above them sighing,

Turn them round and round,

Make a ghostly sound

As of footsteps failing, flying,

Voices through the chambers crying,

Of the haunted house.

     V

Gazing down in her white shroud,

Shroud of windy cloud,

Comes at night the phantom moon;

Comes and all the shadows soon,

Crowding in the rooms, arouse;

Shadows, ghosts, her rays lead on,

Till beneath the cloud

Like a ghost she's gone,

In her gusty shroud,

O'er the haunted house.

Madison Cawein

October

I OFT have met her slowly wandering

Beside a leafy stream, her locks blown wild,

Her cheeks a hectic flush, more fair than Spring,

As if on her the sumach copse had smiled.

Or I have seen her sitting, tall and brown,--

Her gentle eyes with foolish weeping dim,--

Beneath a twisted oak from whose red leaves

She wound great drowsy wreaths and cast them down;

The west-wind in her hair, that made it swim

Far out behind, deep as the rustling sheaves.

Or in the hill-lands I have often seen

The marvel of her passage; glimpses faint

Of glimmering woods that glanced the hills between,

Like Indian faces, fierce with forest paint.

Or I have met her 'twixt two beechen hills,

Within a dingled valley near a fall,

Held in her nut-brown hand one cardinal flower;

Or wading dimly where the leaf-dammed rills

Went babbling through the wildwood's arrased hall,

Where burned the beech and maples glared their power.

Or I have met her by some ruined mill,

Where trailed the crimson creeper, serpentine,

On fallen leaves that stirred and rustled chill,

And watched her swinging in the wild-grape vine.

While Beauty, sad among the vales and mountains,

More sad than death, or all that death can teach,

Dreamed of decay and stretched appealing arms,

Where splashed the murmur of the forest's fountains;

With all her loveliness did she beseech,

And all the sorrow of her wildwood charms.

Once only in a hollow, girt with trees,

A-dream amid wild asters filled with rain,

I glimpsed her cheeks red-berried by the breeze,

In her dark eyes the night's sidereal stain.

And once upon an orchard's tangled path,

Where all the golden-rod had turned to brown,

Where russets rolled and leaves were sweet of breath,

I have beheld her 'mid her aftermath

Of blossoms standing, in her gypsy gown,

Within her gaze the deeps of life and death.

Madison Cawein

Poetry

WHO hath beheld the goddess face to face,

Blind with her beauty, all his days shall go

Climbing lone mountains towards her temple's place,

Weighed with song's sweet, inexorable woe.

Madison Cawein

The Unimaginative

EACH form of beauty's but the new disguise

Of thoughts more beautiful than forms can be:

Sceptics, who search with unanointed eyes,

Never the Earth's wild fairy-dance shall see.

Madison Cawein

The Stars

THESE--the bright symbols of man's hope and fame,

In which he reads his blessing or his curse--

Are syllables with which God speaks His name

In the vast utterance of the universe.

Madison Cawein