Читать книгу The Poems of Madison Cawein. Volume 2 (of 5) - Cawein Madison Julius - Страница 51

Through ironweeds and roses

And scraggy beech and oak,

Old porches it discloses

Above the weeds and roses

The drizzling raindrops soak.

Neglected walks a-tangle

With dodder-strangled grass;

And every mildewed angle

Heaped with dead leaves that spangle

The paths that round it pass.

The creatures there that bury

Or hide within its rooms

And spidered closets—very

Dim with old webs—will hurry

Out 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 alway

Of something that was lost here,

Long, long ago was lost here,

But what, they can not say.

My foot, perhaps, would startle

Some owl that mopes within;

Some bat above its portal,

That frights the daring mortal,

And guards its cellared sin.

The creaking road winds by it

This side the dusty toll.—

Why do I stop to eye it?

My heart can not deny it—

The house is like my soul.