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

tools of fate, the toys of time!

      II

The bitterness of his bereavement speaks in him:

      Vased in her bedroom window, white

      As her glad girlhood, never lost,

      I smelt the roses—and the night

      Outside was fog and frost.

      What though I claimed her dying there!

      God nor one angel understood

      Nor cared, who from sweet feet to hair

      Had 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 among

      The 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 to

      My soul what my heart should quell to

      Calm, that is mine at hours.

      Dear, is your soul still daggered

      There 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 indecision

      Utter 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 glistened

      On my window, white of glow,

      Once I woke and, leaning, listened

      To 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 glimmer

      Of the storm was on the pane,

      Once I sat and heard a dimmer

      Voice lamenting in the rain.

      Full of parting and unspoken

      Heartbreak, 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 grace

      And unrealities, a little while

      Illusions lead me, ending in the smile

      Of 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 stones

      Of 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, forsaken

      Twilight at the night has guessed;

      And no star of dusk has taken

      Flame unshaken in the west.

      All day long the woodlands, dying,

      Moaned, and drippings as of grief

      Rained from barren boughs with sighing

      Death of flying twig and leaf.

      Ah, to live a life unbroken

      Of the flings and scorns of fate!

      Like that tree, with branches oaken,

      Strength’s unspoken intimate.—

      Who can say that we have never

      Lived the life of plants and trees?—

      Not so wide the lines that sever

      Us forever here from these.

      Colors,