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...
Madison Cawein
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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;... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
We have sent him seeds of the melon’s core,
And nailed a warning upon his door;
By the Ku Klux laws we can do no more.Down in the hollow, mid crib and stack,
The roof of his low-porched house looks black,
Not a line of light at the doorsill’s crack.... -
Calling, the heron flies athwart the blue
That sleeps above it; reach on rocky reach
Of water sings by sycamore and beech,
In whose warm shade bloom lilies not a few.
It is a page whereon the sun and dew
Scrawl sparkling words in dawn’s delicious speech;... -
An heritage of hopes and fears
And dreams and memory,
And vices of ten thousand years
God gives to thee.A house of clay, the home of Fate,
Haunted of Love and Sin,
Where Death stands knocking at the gate
To let him in. -
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
... -
Teach me the secret of thy loveliness,
That, being made wise, I may aspire to be
As beautiful in thought, and so express
Immortal truths to earth’s mortality;
Though to my soul ability be less
Than ’t is to thee, O sweet anemone.Teach me...