THE POEMS OF

MADISON CAWEIN

VOLUME I
LYRICS AND OLD WORLD
IDYLLS

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"It shall go hard with him through thee, unconquerable blade" Page [270]
Accolon of Gaul

THE POEMS OF
MADISON CAWEIN

Volume I

LYRICS AND OLD
WORLD IDYLLS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
EDMUND GOSSE

Illustrated
WITH PHOTOGRAVURES AFTER PAINTINGS
BY ERIC PAPE

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1887, 1888, 1889, 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893,
1898 and 1907, by Madison Cawein

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

TO WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
WHO WAS THE FIRST TO RECOGNIZE AND ENCOURAGE
MY ENDEAVORS, THIS VOLUME IS
INSCRIBED WITH AFFECTION,
ADMIRATION AND ESTEEM

PREFACE

This first collected edition of my poems contains all the verses I care to retain except the translations from the German, published in 1895 under the title of The White Snake, and some of the poems in Nature-Notes and Impressions, published in 1906.

Several of the poems which I probably would have omitted I have retained at the solicitation of friends, who have based their argument for their retention upon the generally admitted fact that a poet seldom knows his best work.

The new arrangement under new titles I found was necessary for the sake of convenience; and the poems in a manner grouped themselves in certain classes. In eliminating the old titles—some eighteen in number—I have disregarded entirely, except in the case of the first volume, the date of the appearance of each poem, placing every one, according to its subject matter, in its proper group under its corresponding title.

Most of the poems, especially the earlier ones, have been revised; many of them almost entirely rewritten and, I think, improved.

Madison Cawein.

Louisville, Kentucky.

INTRODUCTION

Since the disappearance of the latest survivors of that graceful and somewhat academic school of poets who ruled American literature so long from the shores of Massachusetts, serious poetry in the United States seems to have been passing through a crisis of languor. Perhaps there is no country on the civilized globe where, in theory, verse is treated with more respect and, in practice, with greater lack of grave consideration than in America. No conjecture as to the reason of this must be attempted here, further than to suggest that the extreme value set upon sharpness, ingenuity and rapid mobility is obviously calculated to depreciate and to condemn the quiet practice of the most meditative of the arts. Hence we find that it is what is called "humorous" verse which is mainly in fashion on the western side of the Atlantic. Those rhymes are most warmly welcomed which play the most preposterous tricks with language, which dazzle by the most mountebank swiftness of turn, and which depend most for their effect upon paradox and the negation of sober thought. It is probable that the diseased craving for what is "smart," "snappy," and wide-awake, and the impulse to see everything foreshortened and topsy-turvy, must wear themselves out before cooler and more graceful tastes again prevail in imaginative literature.

Whatever be the cause, it is certain that this is not a moment when serious poetry, of any species, is flourishing in the United States. The absence of anything like a common impulse among young writers, of any definite and intelligible, if excessive, parti pris, is immediately observable if we contrast the American, for instance, with the French poets of the last fifteen years. Where there is no school and no clear trend of executive ambition, the solitary artist, whose talent forces itself up into the light and air, suffers unusual difficulties, and runs a constant danger of being choked in the aimless mediocrity that surrounds him. We occasionally meet with a poet in the history of literature, of whom we are inclined to say: "Charming as he is, he would have developed his talent more evenly and conspicuously, if he had been accompanied from the first by other young men like-minded, who would have formed for him an atmosphere and cleared for him a space." This is the one regret I feel in contemplating, as I have done for years past, the ardent and beautiful talent of Mr. Madison Cawein. I deplore the fact that he seems to stand alone in his generation; I think his poetry would have been even better than it is, and its qualities would certainly have been more clearly perceived, and more intelligently appreciated, if he were less isolated. In his own country, at this particular moment, in this matter of serious nature-painting in lyric verse, Mr. Cawein possesses what Cowley would have called "a monopoly of wit." In one of his lyrics Mr. Cawein asks—

"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 cat-bird scatters through the hush

The sparkling crystals of her song;

Within the woods no hermit-thrush

Trails an enchanted flute along."

To this inquiry, the answer is: the only hermit-thrush now audible seems to sing from Louisville, Kentucky. America will, we may be perfectly sure, calm herself into harmony again, and possess once more her school of singers. In those coming days, history may perceive in Mr. Cawein the golden link that bound the music of the past to the music of the future through an interval of comparative tunelessness.

The career of Mr. Madison Cawein is represented to me as being most uneventful. He seems to have enjoyed unusual advantages for the cultivation and protection of the poetical temperament. He was born on the 23rd of March, 1865, in the metropolis of Kentucky, the vigorous city of Louisville, on the southern side of the Ohio, in the midst of a country celebrated for tobacco and whisky and Indian corn. These are commodities which may be consumed in excess, but in moderation they make glad the heart of man. They represent a certain glow of the earth, they indicate the action of a serene and gentle climate upon a rich soil. It was in this delicate and voluptuous state of Kentucky that Mr. Cawein was born, that he was educated, that he became a poet, and that he has lived ever since. His blood is full of the color and odor of his native landscape. The solemn books of history tell us that Kentucky was discovered in 1769, by Daniel Boone, a hunter. But he first discovers a country who sees it first, and teaches the world to see it; no doubt some day the city of Louisville will erect, in one of its principal squares, a statue to "Madison Cawein, who discovered the Beauty of Kentucky." The genius of this poet is like one of those deep rivers of his native state, which cut paths through the forests of chestnut and hemlock as they hurry towards the south and west, brushing with the impulsive fringe of their currents the rhododendrons and calmias and azaleas that bend from the banks to be mirrored in their flashing waters.

Mr. Cawein's vocation to poetry was irresistible. I do not know that he even tried to resist it. I have even the idea that a little more resistance would have been salutary for a talent which nothing could have discouraged, and which opposition might have taught the arts of compression and selection. Mr. Cawein suffered at first, I think, from lack of criticism more than from lack of eulogy. From his early writings I seem to gather an impression of a Louisville more ready to praise what was second-rate than what was first-rate, and practically, indeed, without any scale of appreciation whatever. This may be a mistake of mine; at all events, Mr. Cawein has had more to gain from the passage of years in self-criticism than in inspiring enthusiasm. The fount was in him from the first; but it bubbled forth before he had digged a definite channel for it. Sometimes, to this very day, he sports with the principles of syntax, as Nature played games so long ago with the fantastic caverns of the valley of the Green River or with the coral-reefs of his own Ohio. He has bad rhymes, amazing in so delicate an ear; he has awkwardness of phrase not expected in one so plunged in contemplation of the eternal harmony of Nature. But these grow fewer and less obtrusive as the years pass by.

The virgin timber-forests of Kentucky, the woods of honey-locust and buckeye, of white oak and yellow poplar, with their clearings full of flowers unknown to us by sight or name, from which in the distance are visible the domes of the far-away Cumberland Mountains,—this seems to be the hunting-field of Mr. Cawein's imagination. Here all, it must be confessed, has hitherto been unfamiliar to the Muses. If Persephone "of our Cumnor cowslips never heard," how much less can her attention have been arrested by clusters of orchids from the Ocklawaha, or by the song of the whippoorwill, rung out when "the west was hot geranium-red" under the boughs of a black-jack on the slopes of Mount Kinnex. "Not here," one is inclined to exclaim, "not here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee," but the art of the poet is displayed by his skill in breaking down these prejudices of time and place. Mr. Cawein reconciles us to his strange landscape—the strangeness of which one has to admit is mainly one of nomenclature,—by the exercise of a delightful instinctive pantheism. He brings the ancient gods to Kentucky, and it is marvelous how quickly they learn to be at home there. Here is Bacchus, with a spicy fragment of calamus-root in his hand, trampling the blue-eyed grass, and skipping, with the air of a hunter born, into the hickory thicket, to escape Artemis, whose robes, as she passes swiftly with her dogs through the woods, startle the humming-birds, silence the green tree-frogs, and fill the hot still air with the perfumes of peppermint and pennyroyal. It is a queer landscape, but one of new natural beauties frankly and sympathetically discovered, and it forms a mise en scene which, I make bold to say, would have scandalized neither Keats nor Spenser.

It was Mr. Howells,—ever as generous in discovering new talent as he is unflinching in reproof of the effeteness of European taste,—who first drew attention to the originality and beauty of Mr. Cawein's poetry. The Kentucky poet had, at that time, published but one tentative volume, the Blooms of the Berry, of 1887. This was followed, in 1888, by The Triumph of Music, and since then hardly a year has passed without a slender sheaf of verse from Mr. Cawein's garden. Among these (if a single volume is to be indicated), the quality which distinguishes him from all other poets,—the Kentucky flavor, if we may call it so,—is perhaps to be most agreeably detected in Intimations of the Beautiful.

But it is time that I should leave the American lyrist to make his own appeal, with but one additional word of explanation, namely, that in this introduction Mr. Cawein's narrative poems on medieval themes, and in general his cosmopolitan writings, have been neglected of mention in favor of such nature lyrics as would present him most vividly in his own native landscape, no visitor in spirit to Europe, but at home in that bright and exuberant West—

"Where, in the hazy morning, runs

The stony branch that pools and drips,

Where red haws and the wild-rose hips

Are strewn like pebbles; where the sun's

Own gold seems captured by the weeds;

To see, through scintillating seeds,

The hunters steal with glimmering guns.

To stand within the dewy ring

Where pale death smites the boneset's 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!"

So sweet a voice, so consonant with the music of the singers of past times, heard in a place so fresh and strange, will surely not pass without its welcome from lovers of genuine poetry.

Edmund Gosse.

London, England.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

LYRICS

Wine-warm winds that sigh and sing

Led me, wrapped in many moods,

Through the green, sonorous woods

Of belated spring.

Till I came where, glad with heat,

Waste and wild the fields were strewn,

Olden as the olden moon,

At my weary feet.

Wild and white with starry bloom,

One far milky-way that dashed,

When some mad wind down it flashed,

Into billowy foam.

I, bewildered, gazed around,

As one on whose heavy dreams

Comes a sudden burst of beams,

Like a mighty sound....

If the grander flowers I sought,

But these berry-blooms to you,

Evanescent as the dew,

Only these I brought.

BLOOMS OF THE BERRY.

THE WOOD GOD

I

What deity for dozing Laziness

Devised the lounging leafiness of this

Secluded nook?—And how!—did I distress

His musing ease that fled but now? or his

Communion with some forest-sister, fair

And shy as is the whippoorwill-flower there,

Did I disturb?—Still is the wild moss warm

And fragrant with late pressure,—as the palm

Of some hot Hamadryad, who, a-nap,

Props her hale cheek upon it, while her arm

Is wildflower-buried; in her hair the balm

Of a whole spring of blossoms and of sap.—

II

See, how the dented moss, that pads the hump

Of these distorted roots, elastic springs

From that god's late reclining! Lump by lump

Its points, impressed, rise in resilient rings,

As stars crowd, qualming through gray evening skies.—

Invisible presence, still I feel thy eyes

Regarding me, bringing dim dreams before

My half-closed gaze, here where great, green-veined leaves

Reach, waving at me, their innumerable hands,

Stretched towards this water where the sycamore

Stands burly guard; where every ripple weaves

A ceaseless, wavy quivering as of bands.

III

Of elfin chivalry, that, helmed with gold,

Invisible march, making a twinkling sound.—

What brought thee here?—this wind, that steals the old

Gray legends from the forests and around

Whispers them now? Or, in those purple weeds

The hermit brook so busy with his beads?—

Lulling the silence with his prayers all day,

Droning soft Aves on his rosary

Of bubbles.—Or, that butterfly didst mark

On yon hag-taper, towering by the way,

A witch's yellow torch?—Or didst, like me,

Watch, drifting by, these curled, brown bits of bark?

IV

Or con the slender gold of this dim, still

Unmoving minnow 'neath these twisted roots,

Thrust o'er the smoky topaz of this rill?—

Or, in this sunlight, did those insect flutes,

Sleepy with summer, drowsily forlorn,

Remind thee of Tithonos and the Morn?

Until thine eyes dropped dew, the dimpled stream

Crinkling with crystal o'er the winking grail?—

Or didst perplex thee with some poet plan

To drug this air with beauty to make dream,—

Presence unseen, still watching in yon vale!—

Me, wildwood-wandered from the haunts of man!

LOVELINESS

I

Now let us forth to find the young witch Spring,

Seated amid her bow'rs and birds and buds,

Busy with loveliness.—And, wandering

Among old forests that the sunlight floods,

Or vales of hermit-holy solitudes,

Dryads shall beckon us from where they cling,

Their limbs an oak-bark brown; their hair—wild woods

Have perfumed—wreathed with earliest leaves: and they,

Regarding us with a dew-sparkling eye,

Shall whispering greet us, as the rain the rye,

Or from wild lips melodious welcome fling,

Like hidden waterfalls with winds at play.

II

Let us surprise the Naiad ere she slips—

Nude at her toilette—in her fountain's glass;

With damp locks dewy and evasive hips,

Cool-dripping, but an instant seen, alas!

When from indented moss and plushy grass—

Fear in her great eyes' rainbow-blue—she dips,

Irised, the cloven water; as we pass

Making a rippled circle that shall hide,

From our exploring eyes, what watery path

She gleaming took; what crystal haunt she hath

In minnowy freshness, where her murmurous lips,

Bubbling, make merry 'neath the rocky tide.

III

Then we may meet the Oread, whose eyes

Are dewdrops where twin heavens shine confessed:

She, all the maiden modesty's surprise

Rosying her temples,—to slim loins and breast

Tempestuous, brown, bewildering tresses pressed,—

Shall stand a moment's moiety in wise

Of some delicious dream, then shrink, distressed,

Like some wild mist that, hardly seen, is gone,

Footing the ferny hillside without sound;

Or, like storm sunlight, her white limbs shall bound,

A thistle's instant, towards a woody rise,

A flying glimmer o'er the dew-drenched lawn.

IV

And we may see the Satyrs in the shades

Of drowsy dells pipe, and, goat-footed, dance;

And Pan himself reel rollicking through the glades;

Or, hidden in bosky bow'rs, the Lust, perchance,

Faun-like, that waits with heated, animal glance

The advent of the Loveliness that wades

Thigh-deep through flowers, naked as Romance,

All unsuspecting, till two hairy arms

Clasp her rebellious beauty, panting white,

Whose tearful terror, struggling into might,

Beats the brute brow resisting, but evades

Not him, for whom the gods designed her charms.

WAITING

Were it but May now, while

Our hearts are yearning,

How they would bound and smile,

The young blood burning!

Around the tedious dial

No slow hands turning.

Were it but May now!—say,

What joy to go,

Your hand in mine all day,

Where blossoms blow!

Your hand, more white than May,

May's flowers of snow.

Were it but May now!—think,

What wealth she has!

The bluet and wild-pink,

Wild flowers,—that mass

About the wood-brook's brink,—

And sassafras.

Nights, that the large stars strew,

Heaven on heaven rolled;

Nights, pearled with stars and dew,

Whose heavens hold

Aromas, and the new

Moon's curve of gold.

So mad, so wild is March!—

I long, oh, long

To see the redbud's torch

Flame far and strong;

Hear, on my vine-climbed porch,

The bluebird's song.

How slow the Hours creep,

Each with a crutch!—

Ah, could my spirit leap

Its bounds and touch

That day, no thing would keep—

Or matter much!

But now, with you away,

Time halts and crawls,

Feet clogged with winter clay,

That never falls,

While, distant still, that day

Of meeting calls.

LONGINGS

Now when the first wild violets peer

All rain-filled at blue April skies,

As on one smiles one's sweetheart dear

With the big teardrops in her eyes:

Now when the May-apples, I wis,

Bloom white along lone, greenwood creeks,

As bashful as the cheeks you kiss,

As waxen as your sweetheart's cheeks:

Within the soul what longings rise

To stamp the town-dust from the feet!

Fare forth to gaze in Spring's clean eyes,

And kiss her cheeks so cool and sweet!

THE SWEET O' THE YEAR

I

How can I help from laughing, while

The daffodillies at me smile?

The dancing dew winks tipsily

In clusters of the lilac-tree,

And crocus' mouths and hyacinths'

Storm through the grassy labyrinths

A mirth of pearl and violet;

While roses, bud by bud,

Laugh from each dainty-lacing net

Red lips of maidenhood.

II

How can I help from singing when

The swallow and the hawk again

Are noisy in the hyaline

Of happy heavens, clear as wine?

The robin, lustily and shrill,

Pipes on the timber-belted hill;

And o'er the fallow skim the bold,

Mad orioles that glow

Like shining shafts of ingot gold

Shot from the morning's bow.

III

How can I help from loving, dear,

Since love is of the sweetened year?—

The very insects feel his power,

And chirr and chirrup hour on hour;

The bee and beetle in the noon,

The cricket underneath the moon:—

What else to do but follow too,

Since youth is on the wing,

Lord Life who follows through the dew

Lord Love a-carolling.