Madison Cawein
Madison (Julius) Cawein was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1865, and spent most of his life in the state of his birth. He wrote an enormous quantity of verse, publishing more than twenty volumes of pleasant, sometimes exuberant but seldom distinguished poetry. Lyrics and Idyls (1890) and Vale of Tempe (1905) contain his most characteristic stanzas, packed with the lush, adjectival love of Nature that led certain of his admirers to call him (and, one must admit, the alliteration was tempting) “the Keats of Kentucky.”
Cawein’s work divides itself into two distinct veins. In the one, he dealt with the scenes and incidents of his mountain environment: the sag of an old house in the hills, the echoes of a feud, rumblings of the Ku Klux Klan, the ghastly details of a lynching. In his other mood (the one which unfortunately possessed him the greater part of the time) he spent page after page romanticizing Nature, touching up his already painted lilies, polishing his thinly-plated artificialities until the base metal showed through. He pictured all outdoors with painstaking detail. And yet it is somehow unreal, prettified, remote. Every now and then, with an irritating frequency, he tries to transport his audience to a literary Fairyland; but the reader is quickly wearied by the almost interminable procession of fays, gnomes, nixies, elves, dryads, sprites, pucks, fauns—be they ever so lyrical.
In spite of Cawein’s too profuse lyricism, several of his pieces will doubtless remain, though it is not likely that the survivors will be the sugared sweetmeats by which his champions (including William Dean Howells) set such store.
Cawein died in Kentucky in 1914.
Snow
The moon, like a round device
On a shadowy shield of war,
Hangs white in a heaven of ice
With a solitary star.
The wind has sunk to a sigh,
And the waters are stern with frost;
And gray, in the eastern sky,
The last snow-cloud is lost.
White fields, that are winter-starved,
Black woods, that are winter-fraught,
Cold, harsh as a face death-carved,
With the iron of some black thought.
The Man Hunt16
The woods stretch wild to the mountain side,
And the brush is deep where a man may hide.
They have brought the bloodhounds up again
To the roadside rock where they found the slain.
They have brought the bloodhounds up, and they
Have taken the trail to the mountain way.
Three times they circled the trail and crossed,
And thrice they found it and thrice they lost.
Now straight through the pines and the underbrush
They follow the scent through the forest’s hush.
And their deep-mouthed bay is a pulse of fear
In the heart of the wood that the man must hear.
The man who crouches among the trees
From the stern-faced men that follow these.
A huddle of rocks that the ooze has mossed—
And the trail of the hunted again is lost.
An upturned pebble; a bit of ground
A heel has trampled—the trail is found.
And the woods re-echo the bloodhounds’ bay
As again they take to the mountain way.
A rock; a ribbon of road; a ledge,
With a pine-tree clutching its crumbling edge.
A pine, that the lightning long since clave,
Whose huge roots hollow a ragged cave.
A shout; a curse; and a face aghast,
And the human quarry is laired at last.
The human quarry, with clay-clogged hair
And eyes of terror, who waits them there;
That glares and crouches and rising then
Hurls clods and curses at dogs and men.
Until the blow of a gun-butt lays
Him stunned and bleeding upon his face.
A rope, a prayer, and an oak-tree near.
And a score of hands to swing him clear.
A grim black thing for the setting sun
And the moon and the stars to look upon.
Penury
Above his misered embers, gnarled and gray,
With toil-twitched limbs he bends; around his hut,
Want, like a hobbling hag, goes night and day,
Scolding at windows and at doors tight-shut.
Deserted
The old house leans upon a tree
Like some old man upon a staff:
The night wind in its ancient porch
Sounds like a hollow laugh.
The heaven is wrapped in flying clouds
As grandeur cloaks itself in gray:
The starlight flitting in and out,
Glints like a lanthorn ray.
The dark is full of whispers. Now
A fox-hound howls: and through the night,
Like some old ghost from out its grave,
The moon comes misty white.