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

you regret,

      Now in November,

      Now we have met?

      What if love wept once!

      What though you knew!

      What if he crept once

      Pleading 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 completer

      Through his control;

      Lifted, made sweeter,

      Filled and made whole,

      Hearing love’s metre

      Sing 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-morrow

      Ceases and we

      Quit this we borrow,

      Mortality,

      What chastens sorrow

      So it may see?—

      (When friends are sighing;

      Round one, and one

      Nearer is lying,

      Nearer the sun,

      When one is dying

      And all is done?

      When there is weeping,

      Weary and deep,—

      God’s be the keeping

      Of those who weep!—

      When our loved, sleeping,

      Sleep their long sleep?—)

      Love! that is dearer

      Than we’re aware;

      Bringing us nearer,

      Nearer than prayer;

      Being the mirror

      That our souls share.

      Still you are weeping!

      Why do you weep?—

      Are tears in keeping

      With 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 clearest

      Eyes 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 how

      I 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 cheeks

      Glow hectic, as before comes night the west burns blood-red streaks?

      Consumption.—“But I promised you my hand?”—a thing forlorn

      Of life; diseased!—O God!—and so, far better so, forsworn!—

      Oh, I was jealous of your love. But think: if I had died

      Ere babe of mine had come to be a solace at your side!

      Had it been little then—your grief, when Heaven had made us one

      In everything that’s good on earth and then the good undone?

      No! no! and had I had a child—what grief and agony

      To know that blight born in him, too, against all help of me!

      Just when we cherished him the most, and youthful, sunny pride

      Sat on his curly front, to see him die ere we had died.—

      Whose fault?—Ah, God!—not mine! but his, that ancestor who gave

      Escutcheon 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 spun

      Of 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 cough

      Will interrupt my feeble speech and will not be put off …

      Ah, anyhow, my anodyne is this: to know that you

      Are near and love me!—Kiss me now, as you were wont to do.

      And tell me you forgive me all; and say you will forget

      The 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 ask

      Death, 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 pass

      As writing in the sand or sea:

      Reflections in a looking-glass

      Are 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 clay

      They fashion and yet leave unreal.

      Linked through the ages, one and all,

      In long anthropomorphous chain,

      The human and the animal

      Inseparably must remain.

      Within us still the monstrous shape

      That shrieked in air and howled in slime,

      What are