The Poems of Madison Cawein. Volume 2 (of 5)

VI

She writes to her lover to come to her:

 
Dead lie the dreams we cherished,
The dreams we loved so well;
Like forest leaves they perished,
Like autumn leaves they fell.
Alas! that dreams so soon should pass!
Alas! alas!
 
 
The stream lies bleak and arid,
That once went singing on;
The flowers once that varied
Its banks are dead and gone:
Where these were once are thorns and thirst—
The place is curst.
 
 
Come to me. I am lonely.
Forget all that occurred.
Come to me; if for only
One last, sad, parting word:
For one last word. Then let the pall
Fall over all.
 
 
The day and hour are suited
For what I ’d say to you
Of love that I uprooted.—
But I have suffered, too!—
Come to me; I would say good-by
Before I die.
 

VII

The wind rises; the trees are agitated:

 
Woods that beat the wind with frantic
Gestures and sow darkly round
Acorns gnarled and leaves that antic
Wildly on the rustling ground,
 
 
Is it tragic grief that saddens
Through your souls this autumn day?
Or the joy of death that gladdens
In exultance of decay?
 
 
Arrogant you lift defiant
Boughs against the moaning blast,
That, like some invisible giant,
Wrapped in tumult, thunders past.
 
 
Is it that in such insurgent
Fury, tossed from tree to tree,
You would quench the fiercely urgent
Pangs of some old memory?
 
 
As in toil and violent action,
That still help them to forget,
Mortals drown the dark distraction
And insistence of regret.
 

VIII

She sits musing in the gathering twilight:

 
Last night I slept till midnight; then woke, and, far away,
A cock crowed; lonely and distant I heard a watch-dog bay:
But lonelier yet the tedious old clock ticked on to’ards day.
 
 
And what a day!—remember those morns of summer and spring,
That bound our lives together! each morn a wedding-ring
Of dew, aroma, and sparkle, and buds and birds a-wing.
 
 
Clear morns, when I strolled my garden, awaiting him, the rose
Expected too, with blushes,—the Giant-of-battle that grows
A bank of radiance and fragrance, and the Maréchal-Niel that glows.
 
 
Not in vain did I wait, departed summer, amid your phlox!
’Mid the powdery crystal and crimson of your hollow hollyhocks;
Your fairy-bells and poppies, and the bee that in them rocks.
 
 
Cool-clad ’mid the pendulous purple of the morning-glory vine,
By the jewel-mine of the pansies and the snapdragons in line,
I waited, and there he met me whose heart was one with mine.
 
 
Around us bloomed my mealy-white dusty-millers gay,
My lady-slippers, bashful of butterfly and ray;
My gillyflowers, spicy, each one, as a day of May.
 
 
Ah me! when I think of the handfuls of little gold coins, amass,
My bachelor’s-buttons scattered over the garden grass,
The marigolds that boasted their bits of burning brass;
 
 
More bitter I feel the autumn tighten on spirit and heart;
And regret those days, remembered as lost, that stand apart,
A chapter holy and sacred, I read with eyes that smart.
 
 
How warm was the breath of the garden when he met me there that day!
How the burnished beetle and humming-bird flew past us, each a ray!—
The memory of those meetings still bears me far away:
 
 
Again to the woods a-trysting by the water-mill I steal,
Where the lilies tumble together, the madcap wind at heel;
And meet him among the flowers, the rocks and the moss conceal:
 
 
Or the wild-cat gray of the meadows that the black-eyed Susans dot,
Fawn-eyed and leopard-yellow, that tangle a tawny spot
Of languid panther beauty that dozes, summer-hot....
 
 
Ah! back again in the present! with the winds that pinch and twist
The leaves in their peevish passion, and whirl wherever they list;
With the autumn, hoary and nipping, whose mausolean mist
 
 
Entombs the sun and the daylight: each morning shaggy with fog,
That fits gray wigs on the cedars, and furs with frost each log;
That velvets white the meadows, and marbles brook and bog.—
 
 
Alone at dawn—indifferent: alone at eve—I sigh:
And wait, like the wind complaining: complain and know not why:
But ailing and longing and pining because I can not die.
 
 
How dull is that sunset! dreary and cold, and hard and dead!
The ghost of those last August that, mulberry-rich and red,
The wine of God’s own vintage, poured purple overhead.
 
 
But now I sit with the sighing dead dreams of a dying year;
Like the fallen leaves and the acorns, am worthless and feel as sere,
With a soul that ’s sick of the body, whose heart is one big tear.
 
 
As I stare from my window the daylight, like a bravo, its cloak puts on.
The moon, like a cautious lanthorn, glitters, and then is gone.—
Will he come to-night? will he answer?—Ah, God! would it were dawn!
 

IX

He enters. Taking her in his arms he speaks:

 
They said you were dying.—
You shall not die!…
Why are you crying?
Why do you sigh?—
Cease that sad sighing!—
Love, it is I.
 
 
All is forgiven!—
Love is not poor;
Though he was driven
Once from your door,
Back he has striven,
To part nevermore!
 
 
Will you remember
When I forget
Words, each an ember,
That you regret,
Now in November,
Now we have met?
 
 
What if love wept once!
What though you knew!
What if he crept once
Pleading to you!—
He never slept once,
Nor was untrue.
 
 
Often forgetful,
Love may forget;
Froward and fretful,
Dear, he will fret;
Ever regretful,
He will regret.
 
 
Life is completer
Through his control;
Lifted, made sweeter,
Filled and made whole,
Hearing love’s metre
Sing in the soul.
 
 
Flesh may not hear it,
Being impure;
But in the spirit,
There we are sure;
There we come near it,
There we endure.
 
 
So when to-morrow
Ceases and we
Quit this we borrow,
Mortality,
What chastens sorrow
So it may see?—
 
 
(When friends are sighing;
Round one, and one
Nearer is lying,
Nearer the sun,
When one is dying
And all is done?
 
 
When there is weeping,
Weary and deep,—
God’s be the keeping
Of those who weep!—
When our loved, sleeping,
Sleep their long sleep?—)
 
 
Love! that is dearer
Than we’re aware;
Bringing us nearer,
Nearer than prayer;
Being the mirror
That our souls share.
 
 
Still you are weeping!
Why do you weep?—
Are tears in keeping
With joy so deep?
Gladness so sweeping?
Hearts so in keep?
 
 
Speak to me, dearest!
Say it is true!
That I am nearest,
Dearest to you.—
Smile, with those clearest
Eyes of gray blue.
 

X

She smiles on him through her tears; holding his hand she speaks:

 
They did not say I could not live beyond this weary night,
But now I know that I shall die before the morning’s light.
How weak I am!—but you ’ll forgive me when I tell you how
I loved you—love you; and the pain it is to leave you now?
 
 
We could not wed!—Alas! the flesh, that clothes the soul of me,
Ordained at birth a sacrifice to this heredity,
Denied, forbade.—Ah, you have seen the bright spots in my cheeks
Glow hectic, as before comes night the west burns blood-red streaks?
 
 
Consumption.—“But I promised you my hand?”—a thing forlorn
Of life; diseased!—O God!—and so, far better so, forsworn!—
Oh, I was jealous of your love. But think: if I had died
Ere babe of mine had come to be a solace at your side!
 
 
Had it been little then—your grief, when Heaven had made us one
In everything that’s good on earth and then the good undone?
No! no! and had I had a child—what grief and agony
To know that blight born in him, too, against all help of me!
 
 
Just when we cherished him the most, and youthful, sunny pride
Sat on his curly front, to see him die ere we had died.—
Whose fault?—Ah, God!—not mine! but his, that ancestor who gave
Escutcheon to our sorrowful house, a Death’s-head and a Grave.
 
 
Beneath the pomp of those grim arms we live and may not move;
Nor faith, nor truth, nor wealth avail to hurl them down, nor love!
How could I tell you this?—not then! when all the world was spun
Of morning colors for our love to walk and dance upon.
 
 
I could not tell you how disease hid here a viper germ,
Precedence slowly claiming and so slowly fixing firm.
And when I broke my plighted troth and would not tell you why,
I loved you, thinking, “time enough when I have come to die.”
 
 
Draw off my rings and let my hands rest so … the wretched cough
Will interrupt my feeble speech and will not be put off …
Ah, anyhow, my anodyne is this: to know that you
Are near and love me!—Kiss me now, as you were wont to do.
 
 
And tell me you forgive me all; and say you will forget
The sorrow of that breaking-off, the fever and the fret.—
Now set those roses near me here, and tell me death’s a lie—
Once it was hard for me to live … now it is hard to die.
 

PART V
WINTER

 
We, whom God sets a task,
Striving, who ne’er attain,
We are the curst!—who ask
Death, and still ask in vain.
We, whom God sets a task.
 

I

In the silence of his room. After many days:

 
All, all are shadows. All must pass
As writing in the sand or sea:
Reflections in a looking-glass
Are not less permanent than we.
 
 
The days that mold us—what are they?
That break us on their whirling wheel?
What but the potters! we the clay
They fashion and yet leave unreal.
 
 
Linked through the ages, one and all,
In long anthropomorphous chain,
The human and the animal
Inseparably must remain.
 
 
Within us still the monstrous shape
That shrieked in air and howled in slime,
What are we?—partly man and ape—
The tools of fate, the toys of time!
 

II

The bitterness of his bereavement speaks in him:

 
Vased in her bedroom window, white
As her glad girlhood, never lost,
I smelt the roses—and the night
Outside was fog and frost.
 
 
What though I claimed her dying there!
God nor one angel understood
Nor cared, who from sweet feet to hair
Had changed to snow her blood.
 
 
She had been mine so long, so long!
Our harp of life was one in word—
Why did death thrust his hand among
The chords and break one chord!
 
 
What lily lilier than her face!
More virgin than her lips I kissed!
When morn, like God, with gold and grace,
Broke massed in mist! broke massed in mist!
 

III

Her dead face seems to rise up before him:

 
The face that I said farewell to,
Pillowed a flower on flowers,
Comes back, with its eyes to tell to
My soul what my heart should quell to
Calm, that is mine at hours.
 
 
Dear, is your soul still daggered
There by something amiss?
Love—is he ever laggard?
Hope—is her face still haggard?
Tell me what it is!
 
 
You, who are done with to-morrow!
Done with these worldly skies!
Done with our pain and sorrow!
Done with the griefs we borrow!
Joys that are born of sighs!
 
 
Must we say “gone forever?”
Or will it all come true?
Does mine touch your thought ever?
And, over the doubts that sever,
Rise to the fact that ’s you?
 
 
Love, in my flesh so fearful,
Medicine me this pain!—
Love, with the eyes so tearful,
How can my soul be cheerful,
Seeing its joy is slain!…
 
 
Gone!—’t was only a vision!—
Gone! like a thought, a gleam!—
Such to our indecision
Utter no empty mission;—
Truth is in all we dream!
 

IV

He sinks into deep thought:

 
There are shadows that compel us,
There are powers that control:
More than substance these can tell us,
Speaking to the human soul.
 
 
In the moonlight, when it glistened
On my window, white of glow,
Once I woke and, leaning, listened
To a voice that sang below.
 
 
Full of gladness, full of yearning,
Strange with dreamy melody,
Like a bird whose heart was burning,
Wildly sweet it sang to me.
 
 
I arose; and by the starlight,
Pale beneath the summer sky,
There I saw it, full of far light,—
My dead joy go singing by.
 
 
In the darkness, when the glimmer
Of the storm was on the pane,
Once I sat and heard a dimmer
Voice lamenting in the rain.
 
 
Full of parting and unspoken
Heartbreak, faint with agony,
Like a bird whose heart was broken,
Moaning low it cried to me.
 
 
I arose; and in the darkness,
Wan beneath the winter sky,
There I saw it, cold to starkness,—
My dead love go wailing by.
 

V

He arouses from his abstraction, buries his face in his hands and thinks:

 
So long it seems since last I saw her face,
So long ago it seems,
Like some sad soul in unconjectured space,
Still seeking happiness through perished grace
And unrealities, a little while
Illusions lead me, ending in the smile
Of Death, triumphant in a thorny place,
Among Love’s ruined roses and dead dreams.
 
 
Since she is gone, no more I feel the light,—
Since she has left all dark,—
Cleave, with its revelation, all the night.
I wander blindly, on a crumbling height,
Among the fragments and the wrecks and stones
Of Life, where Hope, amid Life’s skulls and bones,
With weary face, disheartened, wild and white,
Trims her pale lamp with its expiring spark.
 
 
Now she is dead, the Soul, naught can o’erawe,—
Now she is gone from me,—
Questions God’s justice that seems full of flaw,
As is His world, where misery is law,
And all men fools, too willing to be slaves.—
My House of Faith, built up on dust of graves,
The wind of doubt sweeps down as made of straw,
And all is night and I no longer see.
 

VI

He looks from his window toward the sombre west:

 
Ridged and bleak the gray, forsaken
Twilight at the night has guessed;
And no star of dusk has taken
Flame unshaken in the west.
 
 
All day long the woodlands, dying,
Moaned, and drippings as of grief
Rained from barren boughs with sighing
Death of flying twig and leaf.
 
 
Ah, to live a life unbroken
Of the flings and scorns of fate!
Like that tree, with branches oaken,
Strength’s unspoken intimate.—
 
 
Who can say that we have never
Lived the life of plants and trees?—
Not so wide the lines that sever
Us forever here from these.
 
 
Colors, odors, that are cherished,
Haply hint we once were flowers:
Memory alone has perished
In this garnished world that’s ours.
 
 
Music,—that all things expresses,
All for which we’ve sought and sinned,—
Haply in our treey tresses
Once was guesses of the wind.
 
 
But I dream!—The dusk, dark braiding
Locks that lack both moon and star,
Deepens; and, the darkness aiding,
Earth seems fading, faint and far.
 
 
And within me doubt keeps saying—
“What is wrong, and what is right?
Hear the cursing! hear the praying!
All are straying on in night.”
 

VII

He turns from the window, takes up a book, and reads:

 
The soul, like Earth, hath silences
Which speak not, yet are heard:
The voices mute of memories
Are louder than a word.
 
 
Theirs is a speech which is not speech;
A language that is bound
To soul-vibrations, vague, that reach
Deeper than any sound.
 
 
No words are theirs. They speak through things,
A visible utterance
Of thoughts—like those some sunset brings,
Or withered rose, perchance.
 
 
The heavens that once, in purple and flame,
Spake to two hearts as one,
In after years may speak the same
To one sad heart alone.
 
 
Through it the vanished face and eyes
Of her, the sweet and fair,
Of her the lost, again shall rise
To comfort his despair.
 
 
And so the love that led him long
From golden scene to scene,
Within the sunset is a tongue
That speaks of what has been.—
 
 
How loud it speaks of that dead day,
The rose whose bloom is fled!
Of her who died; who, clasped in clay,
Lies numbered with the dead.
 
 
The dead are dead; with them ’tis well
Within their narrow room;—
No memories haunt their hearts who dwell
Within the grave and tomb.
 
 
But what of those—the dead who live!
The living dead, whose lot
Is still to love—ah, God forgive!—
To live and love, forgot!
 

VIII

The storm is heard sounding wildly outside with wind and hail:

 
The night is wild with rain and sleet;
Each loose-warped casement claps or groans:
I hear the plangent woodland beat
The tempest with long blatant moans,
Like one who fears defeat.
 
 
And sitting here beyond the storm,
Alone within the lonely house,
It seems that some mesmeric charm
Holds all things—even the gnawing mouse
Has ceased its faint alarm.
 
 
And in the silence, stolen o’er
Familiar objects, lo, I fear—
I fear—that, opening yon door,
I ’ll find my dead self standing near,
With face that once I wore.
 
 
The stairway creaks with ghostly gusts:
The flue moans; all its gorgon throat
One wail of winds: ancestral dusts,—
Which yonder Indian war-gear coat
With gray, whose quiver rusts,—
 
 
Are shaken down.—Or, can it be,
That he who wore it in the dance,
Or battle, now fills shadowy
Its wampumed skins? and shakes his lance
And spectral plume at me?—
 
 
Mere fancy!—Yet those curtains toss
Mysteriously as if some dark
Hand moved them.—And I would not cross
The shadow there, that hearthstone’s spark,
A glow-worm sunk in moss.
 
 
Outside ’t were better!—Yes, I yearn
To walk the waste where sway and dip
Deep, dark December boughs—where burn
Some late last leaves, that drip and drip
No matter where you turn.
 
 
Where sodden soil, you scarce have trod,
Fills oozy footprints—but the blind
Night there, though like the frown of God,
Presents no fancies to the mind,
Like those that have o’erawed.—
 
 
The months I count: how long it seems
Since summer! summer, when with her,
When on her porch, in rainy gleams
We watched the flickering lightning stir
In heavens gray as dreams.
 
 
When all the west, a sheet of gold,
Flared,—like some Titan’s opened forge,—
With storm; revealing, manifold,
Vast peaks of clouds with crag and gorge,
Where thunder-torrents rolled.
 
 
Then came the wind: again, again
Storm lit the instant earth—and how
The forest rang with roaring rain!—
We could not read—where is it now?—
That tale of Charlemagne:
 
 
That old romance! that tale, which we
Were reading; till we heard the plunge
Of distant thunder sullenly,
And left to watch the lightning lunge,
And storm-winds toss each tree.
 
 
That summer!—How it built us there,
Of sorcery and necromance,
A mental-world, where all was fair;
A land like one great pearl, a-trance
With lilied light and air.
 
 
Where every flower was a thought;
And every bird, a melody;
And every fragrance, zephyr brought,
Was but the rainbowed drapery
Of some sweet dream long sought.
 
 
’Mid which we reared our heart’s high home,
Fair on the hills; with terraces,
Vine-hung and wooded, o’er the foam
Of undiscovered fairy seas,
All violet in the gloam.
 
 
O land of shadows! shadow-home,
Within my world of memories!
Around whose ruins sweeps the foam
Of sorrow’s immemorial seas,
To whose dark shores I come!
 
 
How long in your wrecked halls, alone
With ghosts of joys must I remain?
Between the unknown and the known,
Still hearing through the wind and rain
My lost love moan and moan.
 

IX

He sits by the slowly dying fire. The storm is heard with increased violence:

 
Wild weather. The lash of the sleet
On the gusty casement, clapping—
The sound of the storm like a sheet
My soul and senses wrapping.
 
 
Wild weather. And how is she,
Now the rush of the rain falls serried
There on the turf and the tree
Of the place where she is buried?
 
 
Wild weather. How black and deep
Is the night where the mad winds scurry!—
Do I sleep? do I dream in my sleep
That I hear her footsteps hurry?
 
 
Hither they come like flowers—
And I see her raiment glisten,
Like the robes of one of the hours
Where the stars to the angels listen.
 
 
Before me, behold, how she stands!
With lips high thoughts have weighted,
With testifying hands,
And eyes with glory sated.
 
 
I have spoken and I have kneeled:
I have kissed her feet in wonder—
But, lo! her lips—they are sealed,
God-sealed, and will not sunder.
 
 
Though I sob, “Your stay was long!
You are come,—but your feet were laggard!—
With mansuetude and song
For the heart your death has daggered.”
 
 
Never a word replies,
Never, to all my weeping—
Only a sound of sighs,
And of raiment past me sweeping....
 
 
I wake; and a clock tolls three—
And the night and the storm beat serried
There on the turf and the tree
Of the place where she is buried.
 

RED LEAVES AND ROSES

I

 
And he had lived such loveless years
That suffering had made him wise;
And she had known no graver tears
Than those of girlhood’s eyes.
 
 
And he, perhaps, had loved before—
One, who had wedded, or had died;—
So life to him had been but poor
In love for which he sighed.
 
 
In years and heart she was so young
Love paused and beckoned at the gate,
And bade her hear his songs, unsung;
She laughed that “love must wait.”
 
 
He understood. She only knew
Love’s hair was faded, face was gray—
Nor saw the rose his autumn blew
There in her heedless way.
 

II

 
If he had come to her when May
Danced down the wildwood,—every way
Marked with white flow’rs, as if her gown
Had torn and fallen,—it might be
She had not met him with a frown,
Nor used his love so bitterly.
 
 
Or if he had but come when June
Set stars and roses to one tune,
And breathed in honeysuckle throats
Clove-honey of her spicy mouth,
His heart had found some loving notes
In hers to cheer his life’s long drouth.
 
 
He came when Fall made mad the sky,
And on the hills leapt like a cry
Of battle; when his youth was dead;
To her, the young, the wild, the white;
Whose symbol was the rose, blood-red,
And his the red leaf pinched with blight.
 
 
He might have known, since youth was flown,
And autumn claimed him for its own;
And winter neared with snow, wild whirled,
His love to her would seem absurd;
To youth like hers; whose lip had curled
Yet heard him to his last sad word.
 
 
Then laughed and—well, his heart denied
The words he uttered then in pride;
And he remembered how the gray
Was his of autumn, ah! and hers,
The rose-hued colors of the May,
And May was all her universe.
 
 
And then he left her: and, like blood,
In her deep hair, the rose; whose bud
Was badge to her: while unto him,
His middle-age, must still remain
The red-leaf, withering at the rim,
As symbol of the all-in-vain.