Poems by Madison Julius Cawein Part 14

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

II

It holds and beckons in the streams; It lures and touches us in all The flowers of the golden fall-- The mystic essence of our dreams: A nymph blows bubbling music where Faint water ripples down the rocks; A faun goes dancing hoiden locks, And piping a Pandean air, Through trees the instant wind shakes bare.

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

III

What intimations made them wise, The mournful pine, the pleasant beech?

What strange and esoteric speech?-- (Communicated from the skies In runic whispers)--that invokes The boles that sleep within the seeds, And out of narrow darkness leads The vast a.s.semblies of the oaks.

Within his knowledge, what one reads The poems written by the flowers?

The sermons, past all speech of ours, Preached by the gospel of the weeds?-- O eloquence of coloring!

O thoughts of syllabled perfume!

O beauty uttered into bloom!

Teach me your language! let me sing!

IV

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

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

V

Oh, joy, to walk the way that goes Through woods of sweet-gum and of beech!

Where, like a ruby left in reach, The berry of the dogwood glows: Or where the bristling hillsides ma.s.s, 'Twixt belts of tawny sa.s.safras, Brown shocks of corn in wigwam rows!

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

Oh, joy, to go the path which lies Through woodlands where the trees are tall!

Beneath the misty moon of fall, Whose ghostly girdle prophesies A morn wind-swept and gray with rain; When, o'er the lonely, leaf-blown lane, The night-hawk like a dead leaf flies!

To stand within the dewy ring Where pale death smites the boneset blooms, And everlasting's flowers, and plumes Of mint, with aromatic wing!

And hear the creek,--whose sobbing seems A wild-man murmuring in his dreams,-- And insect violins that sing.

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

VI

Towards evening, where the sweet-gum flung Its th.o.r.n.y b.a.l.l.s among the weeds, And where the milkweed's sleepy seeds,-- A faery Feast of Lanterns,--swung; The cricket tuned a plaintive lyre, And o'er the hills the sunset hung A purple parchment scrawled with fire.

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

Then night drew near, as when, alone, The heart and soul grow intimate; And on the hills the twilight sate With shadows, whose wild robes were sown With dreams and whispers;--dreams, that led The heart once with love's monotone, And memories of the living-dead.

VII

All night the rain-gusts shook the leaves Around my window; and the blast Rumbled the flickering flue, and fast The storm streamed from the dripping eaves.

As if--'neath skies gone mad with fear-- The witches' Sabboth galloped past, The forests leapt like startled deer.

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

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

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

VIII

This dawn, through which the Autumn glowers,-- As might a face within our sleep, With stone-gray eyes that weep and weep, And wet brows bound with sodden flowers,-- Is sunset to some sister land; A land of ruins and of palms; Rich sunset, crimson with long calms,-- Whose burning belt low mountains bar,-- That sees some brown Rebecca stand Beside a well the camel-band Winds down to 'neath the evening star.

O sunset, sister to this dawn!

O dawn, whose face is turned away!

Who gazest not upon this day, But back upon the day that's gone!

Enamored so of loveliness, The retrospect of what thou wast, Oh, to thyself the present trust!

And as thy past be beautiful With hues, that never can grow less!

Waiting thy pleasure to express New beauty lest the world grow dull.

IX

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

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

X

Among the woods they call to me-- The lights that haunt the wood and stream; Voices of such white ecstasy As moves with hushed lips through a dream: They stand in auraed radiances, Or flash with nimbused limbs across Their golden shadows on the moss, Or slip in silver through the trees.

What love can give the heart in me More hope and exaltation than The hand of light that tips the tree And beckons far from marts of man?

That reaches foamy fingers through The broken ripple, and replies With sparkling speech of lips and eyes To souls who seek and still pursue.

XI

Give me the streams, that counterfeit The twilight of autumnal skies; The shadowy, silent waters, lit With fire like a woman's eyes!

Slow waters that, in autumn, gla.s.s The scarlet-strewn and golden gra.s.s, And drink the sunset's tawny dyes.

Give me the pools, that lie among The centuried forests! give me those, Deep, dim, and sad as darkness hung Beneath the sunset's somber rose: Still pools, in whose vague mirrors look-- Like ragged gypsies round a book Of magic--trees in wild repose.

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

XII

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

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

Or wild voice of the dying Year?

XIII