Vindictive looked the scowling firmament,
In which each star, that flashed a dagger ray,
Seemed filled with malice of some dark intent.
The moon caught in its creased web of storm mists is another well-visioned image. Mr. Cawein carries the record on to a third poem, picturing the “Broken Drouth;” all are notable for the infusion of atmosphere,—climatic atmosphere, in this case; and indeed of this palpable sort there is plenty, infused into words that fairly parch the page in such poems as
“Heat,” or “To the Locust,” which give abundant evidence that Mr. Cawein knows whereof he speaks and is not supposing a case. The stanzas to “The Grasshopper” will deepen this conviction when one looks them up in the volume called Weeds by the Wall.
Mr. Cawein has poems in celebration of many other of the creatures whom he links in fellowship with man in his keenly observant verse. “The Twilight Moth,” “The Leaf Cricket,” “The Tree Toad,” “The Chipmunk,” and even the despised “Screech-Owl,” are observed and celebrated with impartial sympathy and love. He shelters in the wood during a summer rain to learn where each tiny fellow of the earth and air bestows himself, and notes that the “lichen-colored moths” are pressed “like knots against the trunks of trees;” that the bees are wedged like “clots of pollen” in hollow blooms, and that the “mantis, long-clawed, furtive, lean,” and the dragonfly are housed together beneath the wild-grape’s leaves and gourds. Each creature’s haunt, ’neath rock or root, or frail roof-bloom, is determined as a naturalist might lie in wait during the summer storm to record for Science’s sake each detail of this forest tenantry.
Imagination has, however, touched it to beauty, while losing none of the fidelity.
To the “Twilight Moth,” “gnome wrought of moonbeam fluff and gossamer,” he addresses in another poem these delicate lines:
Dusk is thy dawn; when Eve puts on her state
Of gold and purple in the marbled west,