Chapter I: Front Matter

Myth and Romance

Being a Book of verses

By MADISON CAWEIN

G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS

New York and London

The Knickerbocker Press

1899

TO

MY FRIEND

WILLIAM WARWICK THUM

CONTENTS

VISIONS AND VOICES

Myth and Romance

Genius Loci

The Rain-Crow

The Harvest Moon

The Old Water-Mill

Anthem of Dawn

Dithyrambics

Hymn to Desire

Music

Jotunheim

Dionysia

The Last Song

Romaunt of the Oak

Morgan le Fay

The Dream of Roderick

Zyps of Zirl

The Glowworm

Ghosts

The Purple Valleys

The Land of Illusion

Spirit of Dreams

LINES AND LYRICS

To a Wind-Flower

Microcosm

Fortune

Death

The Soul

Conscience

Youth

Life's Seasons

Old Homes

Field and Forest Call

Meeting in Summer

Swinging

Rosemary

Ghost Stories

Dolce far Niente

Words

Reasons

Evasion

In May

Will you Forget?

Clouds of the Autumn Night

The Glory and the Dream

Snow and Fire

Restraint

Why Should I Pine?

When Lydia Smiles

The Rose

A Ballad of Sweethearts

Her Portrait

A Song for Yule

The Puritans' Christmas

Spring

Lines

When Ships put out to Sea

The "Kentucky"

Quatrains

Processional

_PROEM._

_There is no rhyme that is half so sweet As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat; There is no metre that's half so fine As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine; And the loveliest lyric I ever heard Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird.-- If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach My heart their beautiful parts of speech. And the natural art that they say these with, My soul would sing of beauty and myth In a rhyme and a metre that none before Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore, And the world would be richer one poet the more._

VISIONS AND VOICES

_Myth and Romance_

I

When I go forth to greet the glad-faced Spring,
Just at the time of opening apple-buds,
When brooks are laughing, winds are whispering,
On babbling hillsides or in warbling woods,
There is an unseen presence that eludes:--
Perhaps a Dryad, in whose tresses cling
The loamy odors of old solitudes,
Who, from her beechen doorway, calls; and leads
My soul to follow; now with dimpling words
Of leaves; and now with syllables of birds;
While here and there--is it her limbs that swing?
Or restless sunlight on the moss and weeds?

II

Or, haply, 't is a Naiad now who slips,
Like some white lily, from her fountain's glass,
While from her dripping hair and breasts and hips,
The moisture rains cool music on the grass.
Her have I heard and followed, yet, alas!
Have seen no more than the wet ray that dips
The shivered waters, wrinkling where I pass;
But, in the liquid light, where she doth hide,
I have beheld the azure of her gaze
Smiling; and, where the orbing ripple plays,
Among her minnows I have heard her lips,
Bubbling, make merry by the waterside.

III

Or now it is an Oread--whose eyes
Are constellated dusk--who stands confessed,
As naked as a flow'r; her heart's surprise,
Like morning's rose, mantling her brow and breast:
She, shrinking from my presence, all distressed
Stands for a startled moment ere she flies,
Her deep hair blowing, up the mountain crest,
Wild as a mist that trails along the dawn.
And is't her footfalls lure me? or the sound
Of airs that stir the crisp leaf on the ground?
And is't her body glimmers on yon rise?
Or dog-wood blossoms snowing on the lawn?

IV

Now't is a Satyr piping serenades
On a slim reed. Now Pan and Faun advance
Beneath green-hollowed roofs of forest glades,
Their feet gone mad with music: now, perchance,
Sylvanus sleeping, on whose leafy trance
The Nymphs stand gazing in dim ambuscades
Of sun-embodied perfume.--Myth, Romance,
Where'er I turn, reach out bewildering arms,
Compelling me to follow. Day and night
I hear their voices and behold the light
Of their divinity that still evades,
And still allures me in a thousand forms.

_Genius Loci_

I

What wood-god, on this water's mossy curb,
Lost in reflections of earth's loveliness,
Did I, just now, unconsciously disturb?
I, who haphazard, wandering at a guess,
Came on this spot, wherein, with gold and flame
Of buds and blooms, the season writes its name.--
Ah, me! could I have seen him ere alarm
Of my approach aroused him from his calm!
As he, part Hamadryad and, mayhap,
Part Faun, lay here; who left the shadow warm
As wildwood rose, and filled the air with balm
Of his sweet breath as with ethereal sap.

II

Does not the moss retain some vague impress,
Green dented in, of where he lay or trod?
Do not the flow'rs, so reticent, confess
With conscious looks the contact of a god?
Does not the very water garrulously
Boast the indulgence of a deity?
And, hark! in burly beech and sycamore
How all the birds proclaim it! and the leaves
Rejoice with clappings of their myriad hands!
And shall not I believe, too, and adore,
With such wide proof?--Yea, though my soul perceives
No evident presence, still it understands.

III

And for a while it moves me to lie down
Here on the spot his god-head sanctified:
Mayhap some dream he dreamed may lingert brown
And young as joy, around the forestside;
Some dream within whose heart lives no disdain
For such as I whose love is sweet and sane;
That may repeat, so none but I may hear--
As one might tell a pearl-strung rosary--
Some epic that the trees have learned to croon,
Some lyric whispered in the wild-flower's ear,
Whose murmurous lines are sung by bird and bee,
And all the insects of the night and noon.

IV

For, all around me, upon field and hill,
Enchantment lies as of mysterious flutes;
As if the music of a god's good-will
Had taken on material attributes
In blooms, like chords; and in the water-gleam,
That runs its silvery scales from stream to stream;
In sunbeam bars, up which the butterfly,
A golden note, vibrates then flutters on--
Inaudible tunes, blown on the pipes of Pan,
That have assumed a visible entity,
And drugged the air with beauty so, a Faun,
Behold, I seem, and am no more a man.

_The Rain-Crow_

I

Can freckled August,--drowsing warm and blonde
Beside a wheat-shock in the white-topped mead,
In her hot hair the oxeyed daisies wound,--
O bird of rain, lend aught but sleepy heed
To thee? when no plumed weed, no feather'd seed
Blows by her; and no ripple breaks the pond,
That gleams like flint between its rim of grasses,
Through which the dragonfly forever passes
Like splintered diamond.

II

Drouth weights the trees, and from the farmhouse eaves
The locust, pulse-beat of the summer day,
Throbs; and the lane, that shambles under leaves
Limp with the heat--a league of rutty way--
Is lost in dust; and sultry scents of hay
Breathe from the panting meadows heaped with sheaves--
Now, now, O bird, what hint is there of rain,
In thirsty heaven or on burning plain,
That thy keen eye perceives?

III

But thou art right. Thou prophesiest true.
For hardly hast thou ceased thy forecasting,
When, up the western fierceness of scorched blue,
Great water-carrier winds their buckets bring
Brimming with freshness. How their dippers ring
And flash and rumble! lavishing dark dew
On corn and forestland, that, streaming wet,
Their hilly backs against the downpour set,
Like giants vague in view.

IV

The butterfly, safe under leaf and flower,
Has found a roof, knowing how true thou art;
The bumble-bee, within the last half-hour,
Has ceased to hug the honey to its heart;
While in the barnyard, under shed and cart,
Brood-hens have housed.--But I, who scorned thy power,
Barometer of the birds,--like August there,--
Beneath a beech, dripping from foot to hair,
Like some drenched truant, cower.

_The Harvest Moon_

I

Globed in Heav'n's tree of azure, golden mellow As some round apple hung High in hesperian boughs, thou hangest yellow The branch-like mists among: Within thy light a sunburnt youth, named Health, Rests 'mid the tasseled shocks, the tawny stubble; And by his side, clad on with rustic wealth Of field and farm, beneath thy amber bubble, A nut-brown maid, Content, sits smiling still: While through the quiet trees, The mossy rocks, the grassy hill, Thy silvery spirit glides to yonder mill, Around whose wheel the breeze And shimmering ripples of the water play, As, by their mother, little children may.