Voice on the Wind, and Other Poems

<h2><SPAN name="BLACK_VESPERS_PAGEANTS" id="BLACK_VESPERS_PAGEANTS"></SPAN>BLACK VESPER'S PAGEANTS.</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> <span class="i0">The day, all fierce with carmine, turns<br/></span> <span class="i1">An Indian face towards Earth and dies;<br/></span> <span class="i0">The west, like some gaunt vase, inurns<br/></span> <span class="i1">Its ashes under smouldering skies,<br/></span> <span class="i0">Athwart whose bowl one red cloud streams,<br/></span> <span class="i0">Strange as a shape some Aztec dreams.<br/></span></div> <div class="stanza"> <span class="i0">Now shadows mass above the world,<br/></span> <span class="i1">And night comes on with wind and rain;<br/></span> <span class="i0">The mulberry-colored leaves are hurled<br/></span> <span class="i1">Like frantic hands against the pane.<br/></span> <span class="i0">And through the forests, bending low,<br/></span> <span class="i0">Night stalks like some gigantic woe.<br/></span></div> <div class="stanza"> <span class="i0">In hollows where the thistle shakes<br/></span> <span class="i1">A hoar bloom like a witch's-light,<br/></span> <span class="i0">From weed and flower the rain-wind rakes<br/></span> <span class="i1">Dead sweetness&mdash;as a wildman might,<br/></span> <span class="i0">From out the leaves, the woods among,<br/></span> <span class="i0">Dig some dead woman, fair and young.<br/></span></div> <div class="stanza"> <span class="i0">Now let me walk the woodland ways,<br/></span> <span class="i1">Alone! except for thoughts, that are<br/></span> <span class="i0">Akin to such wild nights and days;<br/></span> <span class="i1">A portion of the storm that far<br/></span> <span class="i0">Fills Heaven and Earth tumultuously,<br/></span> <span class="i0">And my own soul with ecstasy.<br/></span></div> </div> <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>OTHER VOLUMES</h2> <h3>BY</h3> <h2>MADISON CAWEIN</h2> <div class="blockquot"><p><span class="u">THE GARDEN OF DREAMS</span></p> <p>Printed on hand-made paper; bound in watered silk; only a few copies remaining; price, $1.25 (net)</p> <p><span class="u">WEEDS BY THE WALL</span></p> <p>Tastefully bound in silk cloth; price, $1.25</p> </div> <p class="center">Sent on receipt of price to any address by</p> <p class="center">JOHN P. MORTON &amp; COMPANY<br/> PUBLISHERS<br/> LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY.</p> <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <p class="center">WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, in the <i>North American Review</i> for January, 1902.</p> <p>"One never praises an author for certain things without afterward doubting if they were the characteristic things, or whether just the reverse might not be said. Praise is, in fact, a delicate business, and I, who am rather fond of dealing in it, never feel quite safe. Not only is it questionable at the moment, but the later behavior of the author is sometimes such that one is sorry not to have made it blame. It is always with a shrinking, which I try to hide from the public, that I take up the fresh venture of a poet whom I have once bet on. But there is a joy when I find that I have not lost my wager, which is full compensation for the anxiety suffered. This joy has lately been mine in the latest little book of Mr. Madison Cawein, whose work I long ago confessed my pleasure in. I am not sure that he has transcended the limits which he then seemed to give himself as the lover, the prophet, of beauty in the woods and waters and skies of the southern Mid-West. I do not know that he need have done more than unlock the riches of emotion within these limits. What I am sure of is that in 'Weeds by the Wall' he has more deeply charmed me with an art perfected from that I felt in 'Blooms of the Berry' ten or fifteen years since. Many little books of his have come (I hope not also gone) between the first and last, and none of them has failed to make me glad of his work; and now, again, I am finding the same impassioned moods in the same impassive presences. To my knowledge, no such nature poems have been written within the time since Mr. Cawein began to write as his are, or from such an intimacy with the 'various language' which nature speaks. There are other good poems in the book, poems which would have made reputes in the eighteenth century, and which it would be a shame not to own good in the twentieth; but those which speak for 'The Cricket,' ' A Twilight Moth,' 'The Grasshopper,' 'The Tree-Toad,' 'The Screech Owl,' 'The Chipmunk,' 'Drouth,' 'Before the Rain,' and the like, are in a voice which interprets the very soul of what we call the inarticulate things, though they seem to have enunciated themselves so distinctly to this poet. It is cheap to note his increasing control of his affluent imagery and the growing mastery that makes him so fine an artist. These things were to be expected from his early poems, but what makes one think he will go far and long, and outlive both praise and blame, is the blending of a sense of the Kentucky civilization in such a poem as 'Feud.'... Civilization may not be quite the word for the condition of things suggested here, but there can be no doubt of the dramatic and the graphic power that suggests it, and that imparts a personal sense of the tragic squalor, the sultry drouth, the forlorn <ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'wickednsse'">wickedness</ins> of it all. By such a way as this lies Mr. Cawein's hope of rise from nature up to man, if it is up; and also, as I perceive too late, lies confusion for the critic who said that the poet does not transcend the limits he once seemed to give himself."</p> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />