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

VII

After the final meeting; the day following:I seem to see her still; to seeThat blue-hung room. Her perfume comesFrom lavender folds, draped dreamily,—A-blossom with brocaded blooms,—Some stuff of orient looms.I seem to hear her speak; and back,Where sleeps the sun on books and pilesOf porcelain and bric-à-brac,A tall clock ticks above the tiles,Where Love’s framed profile smiles.I hear her say, “Ah, had I known!—I suffer too for what has been—For what must be.”—A wild ache shoneIn her sad gaze that seemed to leanOn something far, unseen.And as in sleep my own self seemsOutside my suffering self.—I flush’Twixt facts and undetermined dreams,And stand, as silent as that hushOf lilac light and plush.Smiling, but suffering, I feel,Beneath that face, so sweet and sad,In those pale temples, thoughts, like steel,Pierce burningly.... I had gone madHad I once thought her glad.—Unconsciously, with eyes that yearnTo look beyond the present far,For one faint future hope, I turn—There, in her garden, one fierce star,A cactus, red as war,Vermilion as a storm-sunk sun,Flames torrid splendor,—brings to lifeA sunset; memory of oneRich eve she said she ’d be my wife;An eve with beauty rife.Again amid the heavy hues,Soft crimson, seal, and satiny goldOf flowers there, I stood ’mid dewsWith her; deep in her garden old,While sunset’s flame unrolled.And now!… It can not be! and yetTo see ’tis so!—In heart and brainTo know ’tis so!—While, warm and wet,I seem to smell those scents again,Verbena scents and rain.I turn, in hope she ’ll bid me stay.Again her cameo beauty markSet in that smile.—She turns away.No farewell! no regret! no sparkOf hope to cheer the dark!That sepia sketch—conceive it so—A jaunty head with mouth and eyesTragic beneath a rose-chapeau,Silk-masked, unmasking—it deniesThe look we half surmise,We know is there. ’Tis thus we readThe true beneath the false; perceiveThe ache beneath the smile.—Indeed!Whose soul unmasks?… Not mine!—I grieve,—Oh God!—but laugh and leave....

VIII

He walks aimlessly on:Beyond those knotted apple-trees,That partly hide the old brick barn,Its tattered arms and tattered kneesA scarecrow tosses to the breezeAmong the shocks of corn.My heart is gray as is the day,In which the rain-wind drearilyMakes all the rusty branches sway,And in the hollows, by each way,The dead leaves rustle wearily.And soon we ’ll hear the far wild-geeseHonk in frost-bitten heavens underArcturus; when my walks must cease,And by the fireside’s log-heaped peaceI ’ll sit and nod and ponder.—When every fall of this loud creekIs silent with the frost; and tentedBrown acres of the corn stretch bleakAnd shaggy with the snows, that streakThe hillsides, hollow-dented;I ’ll sit and dream of that glad mornWe met by banks with elder snowing;That dusk we strolled through flower and thorn,By tasseled meads of cane and corn,To where the stream was flowing.Again I ’ll oar our boat amongThe dripping lilies of the river,To reach her hat, the grape-vine longStruck in the stream; we ’ll row to song;And then … I ’ll wake and shiver.Why is it that my mind revertsTo that sweet past? while full of partingThe present is: so full of hurtsAnd heartache, that what it assertsAdds only to the smarting.How often shall I sit and thinkOf that sweet past! through lowered lashesWhat-might-have-been trace link by link;Then watch it gradually sinkAnd crumble into ashes.Outside I ’ll hear the sad wind weepLike some lone spirit, grieved, forsaken;Then, shuddering, to bed will creep,To lie awake, or, haply, sleepA sleep by visions shaken.By visions of the past, that drawThe present in a hue that’s wanting;A scarecrow thing of sticks and straw,—Like that just now I, passing, saw,—Its empty tatters flaunting.

IX

He compares the present day with a past one:The sun a splintered splendor wasIn trees, whose waving branches blurredIts disc, that day we went together,’Mid wild-bee hum and whirring buzzOf locusts, through the fields that purredWith summer in the perfect weather.So sweet it was to look, and leanTo her young face and feel the lightOf eyes that met my own unsaddened!Her laugh that left lips more serene;Her speech that blossomed like the whiteLife-everlasting there and gladdened.Maturing summer, you were fraughtWith more of beauty then than nowParades the pageant of September:Where What-is-now contrasts in thoughtWith What-was-once, that bloom and boughCan only help me to remember.

X

He pauses before a deserted house by the wayside:Through ironweeds and rosesAnd scraggy beech and oak,Old porches it disclosesAbove the weeds and rosesThe drizzling raindrops soak.Neglected walks a-tangleWith dodder-strangled grass;And every mildewed angleHeaped with dead leaves that spangleThe paths that round it pass.The creatures there that buryOr hide within its roomsAnd spidered closets—veryDim with old webs—will hurryOut when the evening glooms.Owls roost on beam and basement;Bats haunt its hearth and porch;And, by each ruined casement,Flits, in the moon’s enlacement,The wisp, like some wild torch.There is a sense of frost here,And winds that sigh alwayOf something that was lost here,Long, long ago was lost here,But what, they can not say.My foot, perhaps, would startleSome owl that mopes within;Some bat above its portal,That frights the daring mortal,And guards its cellared sin.The creaking road winds by itThis side the dusty toll.—Why do I stop to eye it?My heart can not deny it—The house is like my soul.

XI

He proceeds on his way:I bear a burden—look not therein!Naught will you find save sorrow and sin;Sorrow and sin that wend with meWherever I go. And misery,A gaunt companion, my wretched bride,Goes ever with me, side by side.Sick of myself and all the earth,I ask my soul now: Is life worthThe little pleasure that we gainFor all our sorrow and our pain?The love, to which we gave our best,That turns a mockery and a jest?

XII

Among the twilight fields:The things we love, the loveliest things we cherish,Pass from us soonest, vanish utterly.Dust are our deeds, and dust our dreams that perishEre we can say They be!I have loved man and learned we are not brothers—Within myself, perhaps, may lie the cause;—Then set one woman high above all others,And found her full of flaws.Made unseen stars my keblahs of devotion;Aspired to knowledge, and remained a clod:With heart and soul, led on by blind emotion,The way to failure trod.Chance, say, or fate, that works through good and evil;Or destiny, that nothing may retard,That to some end, above life’s empty level,Perhaps withholds reward.

PART IV

LATE AUTUMN

They who die young are blest.—Should we not envy such?—They are Earth’s happiest,God-loved and favored much!—They who die young are blest.

I

Sick and sad, propped with pillows, she sits at her window:When the dog’s-tooth violet comesWith April showers,And the wild-bee haunts and humsAbout the flowers,We shall never wend as whenLove laughed leading us from menOver violet vale and glen,Where the red-bird sang for hours,And we heard the flicker drum.Now November heavens are gray:Autumn killsEvery joy—like leaves of MayIn the rills.—Here I sit and lean and listenTo a voice that has arisenIn my heart; with eyes that glistenGazing at the happy hills,Fading dark blue, far away.

II

She looks down upon the dying garden:There rank death clutches at the flowersAnd drags them down and stamps in earth.At morn the thin, malignant hours,Shrill-voiced, among the wind-torn bowers,Clamor a bitter mirth—Or is it heartbreak that, forlorn,Would so conceal itself in scorn.At noon the weak, white sunlight crawls,Like feeble age, once beautiful,From mildewed walks to mildewed walls,Down which the oozing moisture fallsUpon the cold toadstool:—Faint on the leaves it drips and creeps—Or is it tears of love who weeps?At night a misty blur of moonSlips through the trees,—pale as a faceOf melancholy marble hewn;—And, like the phantom of some tune,Winds whisper in the place—Or is it love come back again,Seeking its perished joy in vain?

III

She muses upon the past:When, in her cloudy chiton,Spring freed the frozen rills,And walked in rainbowed light onThe blossom-blowing hills;Beyond the world’s horizon,That no such glory lies on,And no such hues bedizen,Love led us far from ills.When Summer came, a sickleStuck in her sheaf of beams,And let the honey trickleFrom out her bee-hives’ seams;Within the violet-blottedSweet book to us allotted,—Whose lines are flower-dotted,—Love read us many dreams.Then Autumn came,—a liar,A fair-faced heretic;—In gypsy garb of fire,Throned on a harvest rick.—Our lives, that fate had thwarted,Stood pale and broken-hearted,—Though smiling when we parted,—Where love to death lay sick.Now is the Winter waited,The tyrant hoar and old,With death and hunger mated,Who counts his crimes like gold.—Once more, before foreverWe part—once more, then never!—Once more before we sever,Must I his face behold!

IV

She takes up a book and reads:What little things are thoseThat hold our happiness!A smile, a glance; a roseDropped from her hair or dress;A word, a look, a touch,—These are so much, so much.An air we can’t forget;A sunset’s gold that gleams;A spray of mignonette,Will fill the soul with dreams,More than all history says,Or romance of old days.For, of the human heart,Not brain, is memory;These things it makes a partOf its own entity;The joys, the pains whereofAre the very food of love.

V

She lays down the book, and sits musing:How true! how true!—but words are weak,In sympathy they give the soul,To music—music, that can speakAll the heart’s pain and dole;All that the sad heart treasures mostOf love that ’s lost, of love that ’s lost.—I would not hear sweet music now.My heart would break to hear it now.So weary am I, and so fainTo see his face, to feel his kissThrill rapture through my soul again!—There is no hell like this!—Ah, God! my God, were it not bestTo give me rest, to give me rest!—Come, death, and breathe upon my brow.Sweet death, come kiss my mouth and brow.

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 variedIts 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 onlyOne last, sad, parting word:For one last word. Then let the pallFall over all.The day and hour are suitedFor what I ’d say to youOf love that I uprooted.—But I have suffered, too!—Come to me; I would say good-byBefore I die.

VII

The wind rises; the trees are agitated:Woods that beat the wind with franticGestures and sow darkly roundAcorns gnarled and leaves that anticWildly on the rustling ground,Is it tragic grief that saddensThrough your souls this autumn day?Or the joy of death that gladdensIn exultance of decay?Arrogant you lift defiantBoughs against the moaning blast,That, like some invisible giant,Wrapped in tumult, thunders past.Is it that in such insurgentFury, tossed from tree to tree,You would quench the fiercely urgentPangs of some old memory?As in toil and violent action,That still help them to forget,Mortals drown the dark distractionAnd 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-ringOf dew, aroma, and sparkle, and buds and birds a-wing.Clear morns, when I strolled my garden, awaiting him, the roseExpected too, with blushes,—the Giant-of-battle that growsA 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 spotOf languid panther beauty that dozes, summer-hot....Ah! back again in the present! with the winds that pinch and twistThe leaves in their peevish passion, and whirl wherever they list;With the autumn, hoary and nipping, whose mausolean mistEntombs 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 drivenOnce from your door,Back he has striven,To part nevermore!Will you rememberWhen I forgetWords, 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 oncePleading 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 completerThrough his control;Lifted, made sweeter,Filled and made whole,Hearing love’s metreSing 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-morrowCeases and weQuit this we borrow,Mortality,What chastens sorrowSo it may see?—(When friends are sighing;Round one, and oneNearer is lying,Nearer the sun,When one is dyingAnd all is done?When there is weeping,Weary and deep,—God’s be the keepingOf those who weep!—When our loved, sleeping,Sleep their long sleep?—)Love! that is dearerThan we’re aware;Bringing us nearer,Nearer than prayer;Being the mirrorThat our souls share.Still you are weeping!Why do you weep?—Are tears in keepingWith 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 clearestEyes 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 howI 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 cheeksGlow hectic, as before comes night the west burns blood-red streaks?Consumption.—“But I promised you my hand?”—a thing forlornOf life; diseased!—O God!—and so, far better so, forsworn!—Oh, I was jealous of your love. But think: if I had diedEre babe of mine had come to be a solace at your side!Had it been little then—your grief, when Heaven had made us oneIn everything that’s good on earth and then the good undone?No! no! and had I had a child—what grief and agonyTo know that blight born in him, too, against all help of me!Just when we cherished him the most, and youthful, sunny prideSat on his curly front, to see him die ere we had died.—Whose fault?—Ah, God!—not mine! but his, that ancestor who gaveEscutcheon 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 spunOf 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 coughWill interrupt my feeble speech and will not be put off …Ah, anyhow, my anodyne is this: to know that youAre near and love me!—Kiss me now, as you were wont to do.And tell me you forgive me all; and say you will forgetThe 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 askDeath, 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 passAs writing in the sand or sea:Reflections in a looking-glassAre 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 clayThey fashion and yet leave unreal.Linked through the ages, one and all,In long anthropomorphous chain,The human and the animalInseparably must remain.Within us still the monstrous shapeThat 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, whiteAs her glad girlhood, never lost,I smelt the roses—and the nightOutside was fog and frost.What though I claimed her dying there!God nor one angel understoodNor cared, who from sweet feet to hairHad 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 amongThe 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 toMy soul what my heart should quell toCalm, that is mine at hours.Dear, is your soul still daggeredThere 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 indecisionUtter 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 glistenedOn my window, white of glow,Once I woke and, leaning, listenedTo 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 glimmerOf the storm was on the pane,Once I sat and heard a dimmerVoice lamenting in the rain.Full of parting and unspokenHeartbreak, 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 graceAnd unrealities, a little whileIllusions lead me, ending in the smileOf 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 stonesOf 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, forsakenTwilight at the night has guessed;And no star of dusk has takenFlame unshaken in the west.All day long the woodlands, dying,Moaned, and drippings as of griefRained from barren boughs with sighingDeath of flying twig and leaf.Ah, to live a life unbrokenOf the flings and scorns of fate!Like that tree, with branches oaken,Strength’s unspoken intimate.—Who can say that we have neverLived the life of plants and trees?—Not so wide the lines that severUs forever here from these.Colors, odors, that are cherished,Haply hint we once were flowers:Memory alone has perishedIn this garnished world that’s ours.Music,—that all things expresses,All for which we’ve sought and sinned,—Haply in our treey tressesOnce was guesses of the wind.But I dream!—The dusk, dark braidingLocks 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 silencesWhich speak not, yet are heard:The voices mute of memoriesAre louder than a word.Theirs is a speech which is not speech;A language that is boundTo soul-vibrations, vague, that reachDeeper than any sound.No words are theirs. They speak through things,A visible utteranceOf 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 sameTo one sad heart alone.Through it the vanished face and eyesOf her, the sweet and fair,Of her the lost, again shall riseTo comfort his despair.And so the love that led him longFrom golden scene to scene,Within the sunset is a tongueThat 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 wellWithin their narrow room;—No memories haunt their hearts who dwellWithin the grave and tomb.But what of those—the dead who live!The living dead, whose lotIs still to love—ah, God forgive!—To live and love, forgot!