Poems - Cawein Madison Julius

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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….

W. D. HOWELLS.

      From The North American Review. Copyright, 1908, by the North American

      Review Publishing Company.

      POEMS

      HYMN TO SPIRITUAL DESIRE

I

        Mother of visions, with lineaments dulcet as numbers

        Breathed 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 accurst

        With 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.

II

        Like palpable music thou comest, like moonlight; and far,—

        Resonant bar upon bar,—

        The vibrating lyre

        Of 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.

III

        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 wire

        With golden delirium, rebellion and silvery clamor,

        Crying—"Awake! awake!

        Too long hast thou slumbered! too far from the regions of glamour

        With its mountains of magic, its fountains of faery, the spar-sprung,

        Hast thou wandered away, O Heart!"

        Come, oh, come and partake

        Of necromance banquets of Beauty; and slake

        Thy thirst in the waters of Art,

        That are drawn from the streams

        Of love and of dreams.

IV

        "Come, oh, come!

        No longer shall language be dumb!

        Thy vision shall grasp—

        As one doth the glittering hasp

        Of 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 stark

        Eternity, awful and dark,

        Immensity silent and cold,—

        Universe-shaking as trumpets, or cymbaling metals,

        Imperious; yet pensive and pearly

        And soft as the rosy unfolding of petals,

        Or crumbling aroma of blossoms that wither too early,—

        The majestic music of God, where He plays

        On the organ, eternal and vast, of eons and days."

      BEAUTIFUL-BOSOMED, O NIGHT

I

        Beautiful-bosomed, O Night, in thy noon

        Move with majesty onward! soaring, as lightly

        As a singer may soar the notes of an exquisite tune,

        The stars and the moon

        Through the clerestories high of the heaven, the firmament's halls:

        Under whose sapphirine walls,

        June, hesperian June,

        Robed in divinity wanders. Daily and nightly

        The 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 gloom

        Immaterial hosts

        Of 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 hover

        In color and fragrance and loveliness, breathed from the deep

        World-soul of the mother,

        Nature; who over and over,—

        Both sweetheart and lover,—

        Goes singing her songs from one sweet month to the other.

II

        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 atmosphere

        Utters itself, in wonder and mystery,

        Peopling with glimmering essence the hyaline far and the near….

III

        Behold

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