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.—...

Poet: Madison Cawein
The Rain-Crow

Can freckled Auguest,—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...

Poet: Madison Cawein
To a Wind-Flower

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...

Poet: Madison Cawein
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
...

Poet: Madison Cawein
The Soul

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.
Poet: Madison Cawein
The Creek-Road

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;...

Poet: Madison Cawein
Ku Klux

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....

Poet: Madison Cawein
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...

Poet: Madison Cawein
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...

Poet: Madison Cawein
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...

Poet: Madison Cawein