The Poems of Madison Cawein. Volume 2 (of 5). Cawein Madison Julius
you regret,
Now in November,
Now we have met?
What if love wept once!
What though you knew!
What if he crept once
Pleading to you!—
He never slept once,
Nor was untrue.
Often forgetful,
Love may forget;
Froward and fretful,
Dear, he will fret;
Ever regretful,
He will regret.
Life is completer
Through his control;
Lifted, made sweeter,
Filled and made whole,
Hearing love’s metre
Sing in the soul.
Flesh may not hear it,
Being impure;
But in the spirit,
There we are sure;
There we come near it,
There we endure.
So when to-morrow
Ceases and we
Quit this we borrow,
Mortality,
What chastens sorrow
So it may see?—
(When friends are sighing;
Round one, and one
Nearer is lying,
Nearer the sun,
When one is dying
And all is done?
When there is weeping,
Weary and deep,—
God’s be the keeping
Of those who weep!—
When our loved, sleeping,
Sleep their long sleep?—)
Love! that is dearer
Than we’re aware;
Bringing us nearer,
Nearer than prayer;
Being the mirror
That our souls share.
Still you are weeping!
Why do you weep?—
Are tears in keeping
With joy so deep?
Gladness so sweeping?
Hearts so in keep?
Speak to me, dearest!
Say it is true!
That I am nearest,
Dearest to you.—
Smile, with those clearest
Eyes of gray blue.
X
They did not say I could not live beyond this weary night,
But now I know that I shall die before the morning’s light.
How weak I am!—but you ’ll forgive me when I tell you how
I loved you—love you; and the pain it is to leave you now?
We could not wed!—Alas! the flesh, that clothes the soul of me,
Ordained at birth a sacrifice to this heredity,
Denied, forbade.—Ah, you have seen the bright spots in my cheeks
Glow hectic, as before comes night the west burns blood-red streaks?
Consumption.—“But I promised you my hand?”—a thing forlorn
Of life; diseased!—O God!—and so, far better so, forsworn!—
Oh, I was jealous of your love. But think: if I had died
Ere babe of mine had come to be a solace at your side!
Had it been little then—your grief, when Heaven had made us one
In everything that’s good on earth and then the good undone?
No! no! and had I had a child—what grief and agony
To know that blight born in him, too, against all help of me!
Just when we cherished him the most, and youthful, sunny pride
Sat on his curly front, to see him die ere we had died.—
Whose fault?—Ah, God!—not mine! but his, that ancestor who gave
Escutcheon to our sorrowful house, a Death’s-head and a Grave.
Beneath the pomp of those grim arms we live and may not move;
Nor faith, nor truth, nor wealth avail to hurl them down, nor love!
How could I tell you this?—not then! when all the world was spun
Of morning colors for our love to walk and dance upon.
I could not tell you how disease hid here a viper germ,
Precedence slowly claiming and so slowly fixing firm.
And when I broke my plighted troth and would not tell you why,
I loved you, thinking, “time enough when I have come to die.”
Draw off my rings and let my hands rest so … the wretched cough
Will interrupt my feeble speech and will not be put off …
Ah, anyhow, my anodyne is this: to know that you
Are near and love me!—Kiss me now, as you were wont to do.
And tell me you forgive me all; and say you will forget
The sorrow of that breaking-off, the fever and the fret.—
Now set those roses near me here, and tell me death’s a lie—
Once it was hard for me to live … now it is hard to die.
PART V
WINTER
We, whom God sets a task,
Striving, who ne’er attain,
We are the curst!—who ask
Death, and still ask in vain.
We, whom God sets a task.
I
All, all are shadows. All must pass
As writing in the sand or sea:
Reflections in a looking-glass
Are not less permanent than we.
The days that mold us—what are they?
That break us on their whirling wheel?
What but the potters! we the clay
They fashion and yet leave unreal.
Linked through the ages, one and all,
In long anthropomorphous chain,
The human and the animal
Inseparably must remain.
Within us still the monstrous shape
That shrieked in air and howled in slime,
What are