Death

Through some strange sense of sight or touch I find what all have found before, The presence I have feared so much, The unknown’s immaterial door. I seek not and it comes to me; The do not know the thing I find: The fillet of fatality Drops from my brows that made me blind. Point forward now or backward, light! The way I take I may not choose: Out of the night into the night, And in the night no certain clews. But on the future, dim and vast, And dark with dust and sacrifice, Death’s towering ruin from the past Makes black the land that round me lies.

Collection: 
English
Madison Cawein

More from Poet

  • Proem

    From “Myth and Romance” 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...

  • Dirge

    What shall her silence keep Under the sun? Here, where the willows weep And waters run; Here, where she lies asleep, And all is done. Lights, when the tree-top swings; Scents that are sown; Sounds of the wood-bird’s wings; And the bee’s drone: These be her comfortings Under the stone. What shall...

  • Flight

    The song-birds? are they flown away? The song-birds of the summer-time, That sang their souls into the day, And set the laughing days to rhyme?— No catbird scatters through the hush The sparkling crystals of its song; Within the woods no hermit-thrush Trails an enchanted flute along, A...

  • Comradery

    With eyes hand-arched he looks into The morning’s face, then turns away With schoolboy feet, all wet with dew, Out for a holiday. The hill brook sings, incessant stars, Foam-fashioned, on its restless breast; And where he wades its water-bars Its song is happiest. A comrade of the chinquapin, He...

  • Quatrains

    The wind IN THE PINES WHEN winds go organing through the pines On hill and headland, darkly gleaming, Meseems I hear sonorous lines Of Iliads that the woods are dreaming. OPPORTUNITY BEHOLD a hag whom Life denies a kiss As he rides questward in knight-errant-wise; Only when he hath passed her is...