Mr. Cawein is, of course, a poet of Nature, a landscape poet in particular who paints every color on the palette into his work. Had he been an artist he would have exhausted all colors conceived thus far by man, and would fain have originated new ones. There are literally hundreds of his poems in which every line is as surely a stroke as if done with the brush of a painter. Color, color, is his shibboleth-scheme, and he who would woo Nature in her richest robes may read Cawein and be content.
Amazing as it may seem Mr. Cawein has thirty-four volumes to his credit—almost one for every year of his life. This statement stamps him as one of the most prolific poets of modern times, if not, indeed, of all time. And that it is not all quantity, may be seen in the recent declaration of The Poetry Review of London: "He appears quite the biggest figure among American poets; his return to nature has no tinge of affectation; it is genuine to the smallest detail. If he suffers from fatigue, it is in him, at least, not through that desperate satiety of town life which with so many recent poets has ended in impressionism and death."
Bibliography. Poets of the Younger Generation, by William Archer (London, 1901); The Younger American Poets, by Jessie B. Rittenhouse (Boston, 1904); History of American Literature, by R. P. Halleck (New York, 1911); The Poetry Review (London, October, 1912).
CONCLUSION[43]
[From Undertones (Boston, 1896)]
The songs Love sang to us are dead:
Yet shall he sing to us again,
When the dull days are wrapped in lead,
And the red woodland drips with rain.
The lily of our love is gone,
That touched our spring with golden scent;
Now in the garden low upon
The wind-stripped way its stalk is bent.
Our rose of dreams is passed away,
That lit our summer with sweet fire;
The storm beats bare each thorny spray,
And its dead leaves are trod in mire.
The songs Love sang to us are dead;
Yet shall he sing to us again,
When the dull days are wrapped in lead,
And the red woodland drips with rain.
The marigold of memory
Shall fill our autumn then with glow;
Haply its bitterness will be
Sweeter than love of long ago.