Poems by Madison Cawein 1887
The Toad in the Skull
A human skull in a churchyard lay;
For the church was a wreck, and, toppling old,
On the graves of their dead, were the tombstones gray,
And crumbling into mold.
And a hideous toad of this skull had made
A house, a hermitage, long agone,
Where the ivy-tod with many a braid
Half-hid his cell of bone.
And the place was dark; and my feet were drawn
To the desolate spot where the tottering tombs
Seemed sheeted ghosts in the twilight wan
Of the yew-invested glooms.
The night her crescent had slimly hung
From a single star o'er the shattered wall,
And its feeble light on the stone was flung
Where I sat to hear him call.
And I heard this heremite toad as he sate
In the gloom of his ghastly hermitage
To himself and the gloom all hollowly prate,
Like a misanthropic sage:
"Oh, beauty is well and wealth to all;
But wealth without beauty makes fair:
And beauty with wealth brings wooers tall
Whom she snares with her golden hair.
"Though beauty be well and be wealth to all,
And wealth without beauty draw men,
Beauty must come to the vaulted wall,
And what is wealth to her then? . . .
"This skeleton face was beautiful erst;
These sockets were brighter than stars;
And she bartered her beauty for gold accurst --
But the story is older than Mars!" . . .
And he blinked at the moon from his grinning cell,
And the darnels and burdocks were stirred,
Cold-swept of the wind, and I shuddered. -- Well!
Perhaps 'twas my heart I had heard.
Hallowe'en
It was down in the woodland on last Hallowe'en,
Where silence and darkness had built them a lair,
That I felt the dim presence of her, the unseen,
And heard her still step on the hush-haunted air.
It was last Hallowe'en in the glimmer and swoon
Of mist and of moonlight, where once we had sinned,
That I saw the gray gleam of her eyes in the moon,
And hair, like a raven, blown wild on the wind.
It was last Hallowe'en where starlight and dew
Made mystical marriage on flower and leaf,
That she led me with looks of a love, that I knew
Was dead, and the voice of a passion too brief.
It was last Hallowe'en in the forest of dreams,
Where trees are eidolons and flowers have eyes,
That I saw her pale face like the foam of far streams,
And heard, like the night-wind, her tears and her sighs.
It was last Hallowe'en, the haunted, the dread,
In the wind-tattered wood, by the storm-twisted pine,
That I, who am living, kept tryst with the dead,
And clasped her a moment who once had been mine.
Hallowmas
All hushed of glee,
The last chill bee
Clings wearily
To the dying aster:
The leaves drop faster:
And all around, red as disaster,
The forest crimsons with tree on tree.
A butterfly,
The last to die,
Droops heavily by,
Weighed down with torpor:
The air grows sharper:
And the wind in the trees, like some sad harper,
Sits and sorrows with sigh on sigh.
The far crows call;
The acorns fall;
And over all
The Autumn raises
Dun mists and hazes,
Through which her soul, it seemeth, gazes
On ghosts and dreams in carnival.
The end is near:
The dying Year
Learns how to hear
Her own heart breaking,
And Beauty taking
Her flight, and all her dreams forsaking
Her soul, bowed down 'mid the sad and sere.
Imitations of the Beautiful
XXXI
Past midnight, gathering from the west,
With rolling rain the storm came on,
And tore and tossed until the dawn,
Like some dark demon of unrest:
The stairways creaked! the chimneys boomed;
I heard the wild leaves blown about
The windy windows; and the shout
Of forests that the storm had doomed.
I listened, and remembered how
On yesterday I went alone
A sunlit path through fields o'ergrown
With sumac brakes, turned crimson now;
Where asters strung blue pearls and white
Beside the goldenrod's soft ruff;
Where thistles, silvery puff on puff,
Danced many a twinkling witch's-light.
Her joy the Autumn uttered so
To skies where gold and azure blent;
Now storm is the embodiment
Of all her utterance of woe:
The two within me so abide,
That of the two my mind partakes, --
As one, who walks asleep, awakes,
Walks on and thinks, "To-night I died."
Fragments
I
The curtains of my couch sway heavily:
'Tis death, who parts the curtains of my soul.--
Sleep, like a gray expression of ghost lips
Heard through the moonlight of a haunted room,
Seems near yet far away. Would God 'twere day!
Bio: Born in Louisville, Kentucky on March 23, 1865, Madison Cawein grew into a devoted nature lover. His poems, written in the style of early English romance poets such as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, reflected this devotion to the natural world. He earned the nickname "Keats of Kentucky." His poem, Waste Land, published in 1913, inspired T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which was published in 1922. Cawein died December 8, 1914.
