Kentucky Poems

Cawein Madison Julius

Kentucky Poems

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 civilised globe where, in theory, verse is treated with more respect and, in practice, with a greater lack of grave consideration than 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, – with greater decorum, perhaps, – 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. 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 hushThe sparkling crystals of her song;Within the woods no hermit-thrushTrails 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 colour and odour 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 flushing waters.

Mr. Cawein's vocation to poetry was irresistible. I do not know that he ever 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 buck-eye, 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 marvellous how quickly they learn to be at home there. Here is Bacchus, with a spicy fragment of calamus-root in his hand, trampling down 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 penny-royal. It is a queer landscape, but one of new natural beauties frankly and sympathetically discovered, and it forms a mise en scène which, I make bold to say, would have scandalised neither Keats nor Spenser.

It was Mr. Howells, – ever as generous in discovering new native 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 flavour, 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 to English ears, with but one additional word of explanation, namely, that in this selection Mr. Cawein's narrative poems on mediæval themes, and in general his cosmopolitan writings, have been neglected in favour of such 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, runsThe stony branch that pools and drips,Where red-haws and the wild-rose hipsAre strewn like pebbles; where the sun'sOwn gold seems captured by the weeds;To see, through scintillating seeds,The hunters steal with glimmering guns.To stand within the dewy ringWhere pale death smites the bone-set blooms,And everlasting's flowers, and plumesOf mint, with aromatic wing!And hear the creek, – whose sobbing seemsA 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 the lovers of genuine poetry.

EDMUND GOSSE.

PROLOGUE

There is a poetry that speaksThrough common things: the grasshopper,That in the hot weeds creaks and creaks,Says all of summer to my ear:And in the cricket's cry I hearThe fireside speak, and feel the frostWork mysteries of silver nearOn country casements, while, deep lostIn snow, the gatepost seems a sheeted ghost.And other things give rare delight:Those guttural harps the green-frogs tune,Those minstrels of the falling night,That hail the sickle of the moonFrom grassy pools that glass her lune:Or, – all of August in its loudDry cry, – the locust's call at noon,That tells of heat and never a cloudTo veil the pitiless sun as with a shroud.The rain, – whose cloud dark-lids the moon,The great white eyeball of the night, —Makes music for me; to its tuneI hear the flowers unfolding white,The mushroom growing, and the slightGreen sound of grass that dances near;The melon ripening with delight;And in the orchard, soft and clear,The apple redly rounding out its sphere.The grigs make music as of old,To which the fairies whirl and shineWithin the moonlight's prodigal gold,On woodways wild with many a vine:When all the wilderness with wineOf stars is drunk, I hear it say —'Is God restricted to confineHis wonders only to the day,That yields the abstract tangible to clay?'And to my ear the wind of Morn, —When on her rubric forehead farOne star burns big, – lifts a vast hornOf wonder where all murmurs are:In which I hear the waters war,The torrent and the blue abyss,And pines, – that terrace bar on barThe mountain side, – like lovers' kiss,And whisper words where naught but grandeur is.The jutting crags, – all iron-veinedWith ore, – the peaks, where eagles scream,That pour their cataracts, rainbow-stained,Like hair, in many a mountain stream,Can lift my soul beyond the dreamOf all religions; make me scanNo mere external or extreme,But inward pierce the outward planAnd learn that rocks have souls as well as man.

FOREST AND FIELD

IGreen, watery jets of light let throughThe rippling foliage drenched with dew;And golden glimmers, warm and dim,That in the vistaed distance swim;Where, 'round the wood-spring's oozy urn,The limp, loose fronds of forest fernTrail like the tresses, green and wet,A wood-nymph binds with violet.O'er rocks that bulge and roots that knotThe emerald-amber mosses clot;From matted walls of brier and brushThe elder nods its plumes of plush;And, Argus-eyed with many a bloom,The wild-rose breathes its wild perfume;May-apples, ripening yellow, leanWith oblong fruit, a lemon-green,Near Indian-turnips, long of stem,That bear an acorn-oval gem,As if some woodland Bacchus there, —While braiding locks of hyacinth hairWith ivy-tod, – had idly tostHis thyrsus down and so had lost:And blood-root, that from scarlet wombsPuts forth, in spring, its milk-white blooms,That then like starry footsteps shineOf April under beech and pine;At which the gnarled eyes of treesStare, big as Fauns' at Dryades,That bend above a fountain's sparAs white and naked as a star.The stagnant stream flows sleepilyThick with its lily-pads; the bee, —All honey-drunk, a Bassarid, —Booms past the mottled toad, that, hidIn calamus-plants and blue-eyed grass,Beside the water's pooling glass,Silenus-like, eyes stolidlyThe Mænad-glittering dragonfly.And pennyroyal and peppermintPour dry-hot odours without stintFrom fields and banks of many streams;And in their scent one almost seemsTo see Demeter pass, her breathSweet with her triumph over death. —A haze of floating saffron; soundOf shy, crisp creepings o'er the ground;The dip and stir of twig and leaf;Tempestuous gusts of spices briefBorne over bosks of sassafrasBy winds that foot it on the grass;Sharp, sudden songs and whisperings,That hint at untold hidden things —Pan and Sylvanus who of oldKept sacred each wild wood and wold.A wily light beneath the treesQuivers and dusks with every breeze —A Hamadryad, haply, who, —Culling her morning meal of dewFrom frail, accustomed cups of flowers, —Now sees some Satyr in the bowers,Or hears his goat-hoof snapping pressSome brittle branch, and in distressShrinks back; her dark, dishevelled hairVeiling her limbs one instant there.IIDown precipices of the dawnThe rivers of the day are drawn,The soundless torrents, free and far,Of gold that deluge every star.There is a sound of brooks and wingsThat fills the woods with carollings;And, dashed on moss and flow'r and fern,And leaves, that quiver, breathe and burn,Rose-radiance smites the solitudes,The dew-drenched hills, the dripping woods,That twitter as with canticlesOf shade and light; and wind, that smellsOf flowers, and buds, and boisterous bees,Delirious honey, and wet trees. —Through briers that trip them, one by one,With swinging pails, that take the sun,A troop of girls comes – berriers,Whose bare feet glitter where they passThrough dewdrop-trembling tufts of grass.And, oh! their laughter and their cheersWake Echo 'mid her shrubby rocksWho, answering, from her mountain mocksWith rapid fairy horns; as ifEach mossy vale and weedy cliffHad its imperial Oberon,Who, seeking his Titania, hidIn coverts caverned from the sun,In kingly wrath had called and chid.Cloud-feathers, oozing orange light,Make rich the Indian locks of night;Her dusky waist with sultry goldGirdled and buckled fold on fold.One star. A sound of bleating flocks.Great shadows stretched along the rocks,Like giant curses overthrownBy some Arthurian champion.Soft-swimming sorceries of mistThat streak blue glens with amethyst.And, tinkling in the clover dells,The twilight sound of cattle-bells.And where the marsh in reed and grassBurns, angry as a shattered glass,The flies make golden blurs, that shineLike drops of amber-scattered wineSpun high by reeling Bacchanals,When Bacchus wreathes his curling hairWith vine-leaves, and from every lairHis worshippers around him calls.They come, they come, a happy throng,The berriers with gibe and song;Their pails brimmed black to tin-bright eavesWith luscious fruit, kept cool with leavesOf aromatic sassafras;'Twixt which some sparkling berry slips,Like laughter, from the purple mass,Wine-swollen as Silenus' lips.IIIThe tanned and tired noon climbs highUp burning reaches of the sky;Below the drowsy belts of pinesThe rock-ledged river foams and shines;And over rainless hill and dellIs blown the harvest's sultry smell:While, in the fields, one sees and hearsThe brawny-throated harvesters, —Their red brows beaded with the heat, —By twos and threes among the wheatFlash their hot scythes; behind them pressThe binders – men and maids that singLike some mad troop of piping Pan; —While all the hillsides swoon and ringSuch sounds of Ariel airinessAs haunted freckled Caliban.'O ho! O ho! 'tis noon I say.The roses blow.Away, away, above the hay,To the tune o' the bees the roses sway;The love-songs that they hum all day,So low! So low!The roses' Minnesingers they.'Up velvet lawns of lilac skiesThe tawny moon begins to riseBehind low, blue-black hills of trees, —As rises up, in Siren seas,To rock in purple deeps, hip-hid,A virgin-bosomed Oceanid. —Gaunt shadows crouch by tree and scaur,Like shaggy Satyrs waiting forThe moonbeam Nymphs, the Dryads white,That take with loveliness the night,And glorify it with their love.The sweet, far notes I hear, I hear,Beyond dim pines and mellow ways,The song of some fair harvester,The lovely Limnad of the grove,Whose singing charms me while it slays.'O deep! O deep! the earth and airAre sunk in sleep.Adieu to care! Now everywhereIs rest; and by the old oak thereThe maiden with the nut-brown hairDoth keep, doth keepTryst with her lover the young and fair.'IVLike Atalanta's spheres of gold,Within the orchard, apples rolledFrom sudden hands of boughs that layTheir leaves, like palms, against the day;And near them pears of rusty brownLay bruised; and peaches, pink with down,And furry as the ears of Pan,Or, like Diana's cheeks, a tanBeneath which burnt a tender fire;Or wan as Psyche's with desire.And down the orchard vistas, – young,A hickory basket by him swung,A straw-hat, 'gainst the sloping sunDrawn brim-broad o'er his face, – he strode;As if he looked to find some one,His eyes far-fixed beyond the road.Before him, like a living burr,Rattled the noisy grasshopper.And where the cows' melodious bellsTrailed music up and down the dells,Beside the spring, that o'er the groundWent whimpering like a fretful hound,He saw her waiting, fair and slim,Her pail forgotten there, for him.Yellow as sunset skies and paleAs fairy clouds that stay or sailThrough azure vaults of summer, blueAs summer heavens, the wildflowers grew;And blossoms on which spurts of lightFell laughing, like the lips one mightFeign for a Hebe, or a girlWhose mouth is laughter-lit with pearl.Long ferns, in murmuring masses heaped;And mosses moist, in beryl steepedAnd musk aromas of the woodAnd silence of the solitude:And everything that near her blewThe spring had showered thick with dew. —Across the rambling fence she leaned,Her fresh, round arms all white and bare;Her artless beauty, bonnet-screened,Rich-coloured with its auburn hair.A wood-thrush gurgled in a vine —Ah! 'tis his step, 'tis he she hears;The wild-rose smelt like some rare wine —He comes, ah, yes! 'tis he who nears.And her brown eyes and all her faceSaid welcome. And with rustic graceHe leant beside her; and they hadSome talk with youthful laughter glad:I know not what; I know but thisIts final period was a kiss.

SUMMER

IHang out your loveliest star, O Night! O Night!Your richest rose, O Dawn!To greet sweet Summer, her, who, clothed in light,Leads Earth's best hours on.Hark! how the wild birds of the woodsThroat it within the dewy solitudes!The brook sings low and soft,The trees make song,As, from her heaven aloftComes blue-eyed Summer like a girl along.IIAnd as the Day, her lover, leads her in,How bright his beauty glows!How red his lips, that ever try to winHer mouth's delicious rose!And from the beating of his heartWarm winds arise and sighing thence depart;And from his eyes and hairThe light and dewFall round her everywhere,And Heaven above her is an arch of blue.IIICome to the forest, or the treeless meadowsDeep with their hay or grain;Come where the hills lift high their thrones of shadows,Where tawny orchards reign.Come where the reapers whet the scythe;Where golden sheaves are heaped; where berriers blythe,With willow-basket and with pail,Swarm knoll and plain;Where flowers freckle every vale,And beauty goes with hands of berry-stain.IVCome where the dragon-flies, a brassy blue,Flit round the wildwood streams,And, sucking at some horn of honey-dew,The wild-bee hums and dreams.Come where the butterfly waves wings of sleep,Gold-disked and mottled over blossoms deep;Come where beneath the rustic bridgeThe green frog cries;Or in the shade the rainbowed midge,Above the emerald pools, with murmurings flies.VCome where the cattle browse within the brake,As red as oak and strong;Where far-off bells the echoes faintly wake,And milkmaids sing their song.Come where the vine-trailed rocks, with waters hoary,Tell to the sun some legend or some story;Or, where the sunset to the landSpeaks words of gold;Where ripeness walks, a wheaten bandAround her hair and blossoms manifold.VICome where the woods lift up their stalwart armsUnto the star-sown skies;Knotted and gnarled, that to the winds and stormsFling mighty rhapsodies:Or to the moon repeat what they have seen,When Night upon their shoulders vast doth lean.Come where the dew's clear syllableDrips from the rose;And where the fire-flies fillThe night with golden music of their glows.VIINow while the dingles and the vine-roofed glensWhisper their flowery taleUnto the silence; and the lakes and fensUnto the moonlight paleMurmur their rapture, let us seek her out,Her of the honey throat, and peachy pout,Summer! and at her feet,The love of oldLay like a sheaf of wheat,And of our hearts the purest gold of gold.

TO SORROW

IO dark-eyed goddess of the marble brow,Whose look is silence and whose touch is night,Who walkest lonely through the world, O thou,Who sittest lonely with Life's blown-out light;Who in the hollow hours of night's noonCriest like some lost child;Whose anguish-fevered eyeballs seek the moonTo cool their pulses wild.Thou who dost bend to kiss Joy's sister cheek,Turning its rose to alabaster; yea,Thou who art terrible and mad and meek,Why in my heart art thou enshrined to-day?O Sorrow say, O say!IINow Spring is here and all the world is white,I will go forth, and where the forest robesItself in green, and every hill and heightCrowns its fair head with blossoms, – spirit globesOf hyacinth and crocus dashed with dew, —I will forget my grief,And thee, O Sorrow, gazing on the blue,Beneath a last year's leaf,Of some brief violet the south wind woos,Or bluet, whence the west wind raked the snow;The baby eyes of love, the darling huesOf happiness, that thou canst never know,O child of pain and woe.IIIOn some hoar upland, sweet with clustered thorns,Hard by a river's windy white of waves,I shall sit down with Spring, – whose eyes are mornsOf light; whose cheeks the rose of health enslaves, —And so forget thee braiding in her hairThe snowdrop, tipped with green,The cool-eyed primrose and the trillium fair,And moony celandine.Contented so to lie within her arms,Forgetting all the sear and sad and wan,Remembering love alone, who o'er earth's storms,High on the mountains of perpetual dawn,Leads the glad hours on.IVOr in the peace that follows storm, when Even,Within the west, stands dreaming lone and far,Clad on with green and silver, and the HeavenIs brightly brooched with one gold-glittering star.I will lie down beside some mountain lake,'Round which the tall pines sigh,And breathing musk of rain from boughs that shakeStorm balsam from on high,Make friends of Dream and Contemplation highAnd Music, listening to the mocking-bird, —Who through the hush sends its melodious cry, —And so forget a while that other word,That all loved things must die.

NIGHT

Out of the East, as from an unknown shore,Thou comest with thy children in thine arms, —Slumber and Dream, – whom mortals all adore,Their flowing raiment sculptured to their charms:Soft on thy breast thy lovely children rest,Laid like twin roses in one balmy nest.Silent thou comest, swiftly too and slow.There is no other presence like to thine,When thou approachest with thy babes divine,Thy shadowy face above them bending low,Blowing the ringlets from their brows of snow.Oft have I taken Sleep from thy dark arms,And fondled her fair head, with poppies wreathed,Within my bosom's depths, until its stormsWith her were hushed and I but faintly breathed.And then her sister, Dream, with frolic artArose from rest, and on my sleeping heartBlew bubbles of dreams where elfin worlds were lost;Worlds where my stranger soul sang songs to me,And talked with spirits by a rainbowed sea,Or smiled, an unfamiliar shape of frost,Floating on gales of breathless melody.Day comes to us in garish glory garbed;But thou, thou bringest to the tired heartRest and deep silence, in which are absorbedAll the vain tumults of the mind and mart.Whether thou comest with hands full of stars,Or clothed in storm and clouds, the lightning bars,Rolling the thunder like some mighty dress,God moves with thee; we seem to hear His feet,Wind-like, along the floors of Heaven beat;To see His face, revealed in awfulness,Through thee, O Night, to ban us or to bless.