Poems

Оглавление

Cawein Madison Julius. Poems

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

THE POETRY OF MADISON CAWEIN

POEMS

HYMN TO SPIRITUAL DESIRE

BEAUTIFUL-BOSOMED, O NIGHT

DISCOVERY

O MAYTIME WOODS!

THE REDBIRD

A NIËLLO

IN MAY

AUBADE

APOCALYPSE

PENETRALIA

ELUSION

WOMANHOOD

THE IDYLL OF THE STANDING STONE

NOËRA

THE OLD SPRING

A DREAMER OF DREAMS

DEEP IN THE FOREST

I. SPRING ON THE HILLS

II. MOSS AND FERN

III. THE THORN TREE

IV. THE HAMADRYAD

PRELUDES

MAY

WHAT LITTLE THINGS!

IN THE SHADOW OF THE BEECHES

UNREQUITED

THE SOLITARY

A TWILIGHT MOTH

THE OLD FARM

THE WHIPPOORWILL

REVEALMENT

HEPATICAS

THE WIND OF SPRING

THE CATBIRD

A WOODLAND GRAVE

SUNSET DREAMS

THE OLD BYWAY

"BELOW THE SUNSET'S RANGE OF ROSE"

MUSIC OF SUMMER

MIDSUMMER

THE RAIN-CROW

FIELD AND FOREST CALL

OLD HOMES

THE FOREST WAY

SUNSET AND STORM

QUIET LANES

ONE WHO LOVED NATURE

GARDEN GOSSIP

ASSUMPTION

SENORITA

OVERSEAS

PROBLEMS

TO A WINDFLOWER

VOYAGERS

THE SPELL

UNCERTAINTY

IN THE WOOD

SINCE THEN

DUSK IN THE WOODS

PATHS

THE QUEST

THE GARDEN OF DREAMS

THE PATH TO FAERY

THERE ARE FAERIES

THE SPIRIT OF THE FOREST SPRING

IN A GARDEN

IN THE LANE

THE WINDOW ON THE HILL

THE PICTURE

MOLY

POPPY AND MANDRAGORA

A ROAD SONG

PHANTOMS

INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL

OCTOBER

FRIENDS

COMRADERY

BARE BOUGHS

DAYS AND DAYS

AUTUMN SORROW

THE TREE-TOAD

THE CHIPMUNK

THE WILD IRIS

DROUTH

RAIN

AT SUNSET

THE LEAF-CRICKET

THE WIND OF WINTER

THE OWLET

EVENING ON THE FARM

THE LOCUST

THE DEAD DAY

THE OLD WATER MILL

ARGONAUTS

"THE MORN THAT BREAKS ITS HEART OF GOLD"

A VOICE ON THE WIND

REQUIEM

LYNCHERS

THE PARTING

KU KLUX

EIDOLONS

THE MAN HUNT

MY ROMANCE

A MAID WHO DIED OLD

BALLAD OF LOW-LIE-DOWN

ROMANCE

AMADIS AND ORIANA

THE ROSICRUCIAN

THE AGE OF GOLD

BEAUTY AND ART

THE SEA SPIRIT

GARGAPHIE

THE DEAD OREAD

THE FAUN

THE PAPHIAN VENUS

ORIENTAL ROMANCE

THE MAMELUKE

THE SLAVE

THE PORTRAIT

THE BLACK KNIGHT

IN ARCADY

PROTOTYPES

MARCH

DUSK

THE WINDS

LIGHT AND WIND

ENCHANTMENT

ABANDONED

AFTER LONG GRIEF

MENDICANTS

THE END OF SUMMER

NOVEMBER

THE DEATH OF LOVE

UNANSWERED

UNCALLED

Отрывок из книги

When a poet begins writing, and we begin liking his work, we own willingly enough that we have not, and cannot have, got the compass of his talent. We must wait till he has written more, and we have learned to like him more, and even then we should hesitate his definition, from all that he has done, if we did not very commonly qualify ourselves from the latest thing he has done. Between the earliest thing and the latest thing there may have been a hundred different things, and in his swan-long life of a singer there would probably be a hundred yet, and all different. But we take the latest as if it summed him up in motive and range and tendency. Many parts of his work offer themselves in confirmation of our judgment, while those which might impeach it shrink away and hide themselves, and leave us to our precipitation, our catastrophe.

It was surely nothing less than by a catastrophe that I should have been so betrayed in the volumes of Mr. Cawein's verse which reached me last before the volume of his collected poems…. I had read his poetry and loved it from the beginning, and in each successive expression of it, I had delighted in its expanding and maturing beauty. I believe I had not failed to own its compass, and when—

.....

An interesting and charming trait of his poetry is its constant theme of youth and its limit within the range that the emotions and aspirations of youth take. He might indeed be called the poet of youth if he resented being called the poet of nature; but the poet of youth, be it understood, of vague regrets, of "tears, idle tears," of "long, long thoughts," for that is the real youth, and not the youth of the supposed hilarity, the attributive recklessness, the daring hopes. Perhaps there is some such youth as this, but it has not its home in the breast of any young poet, and he rarely utters it; at best he is of a light melancholy, a smiling wistfulness, and upon the whole, October is more to his mind than May.

In Mr. Cawein's work, therefore, what is not the expression of the world we vainly and rashly call the inanimate world, is the hardly more dramatized, and not more enchantingly imagined story of lovers, rather unhappy lovers. He finds his own in this sort far and near; in classic Greece, in heroic England, in romantic Germany, where the blue flower blows, but not less in beautiful and familiar Kentucky, where the blue grass shows itself equally the emblem of poetry, and the moldering log in the cabin wall or the woodland path is of the same poetic value as the marble of the ruined temple or the stone of the crumbling castle. His singularly creative fancy breathes a soul into every scene; his touch leaves everything that was dull to the sense before glowing in the light of joyful recognition. He classifies his poems by different names, and they are of different themes, but they are after all of that unity which I have been trying, all too shirkingly, to suggest. One, for instance, is the pathetic story which tells itself in the lyrical eclogue "One Day and Another." It is the conversation, prolonged from meeting to meeting, between two lovers whom death parts; but who recurrently find themselves and each other in the gardens and the woods, and on the waters which they tell each other of and together delight in. The effect is that which is truest to youth and love, for these transmutations of emotion form the disguise of self which makes passion tolerable; but mechanically the result is a series of nature poems. More genuinely dramatic are such pieces as "The Feud," "Ku Klux," and "The Lynchers," three out of many; but one which I value more because it is worthy of Wordsworth, or of Tennyson in a Wordsworthian 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.

.....