With simple faith; like friendship, draw me after
The dreamy patience that is theirs forever.
Mr. Cawein blends the mood and the picture in the simple tenderness of these lines, with their unstriving felicity. Kentucky’s more strenuous side also finds a chronicler in his verse: the tragedies of its mountains are told in one of the earlier volumes in such poems as “The Moonshiner,” “The Raid,” and “Dead Man’s Run;” and in Weeds by the Wall, in that graphic poem “Feud,” sketching with the pencil of a realist the road to the spot
… where all the land
Seems burdened with some curse,
and where, sunk in obliterative growth of briers, burrs, and ragweed, stands the
… huddled house
Where men have murdered men,
and where a terrified silence still broods, for
The place seems thinking of that time of fear