HOME[45]
[From Nature-Notes and Impressions (New York, 1906)]
A distant river glimpsed through deep-leaved trees.
A field of fragment flint, blue, gray, and red.
Rocks overgrown with twigs of trailing vines
Thick-hung with clusters of the green wild-grape.
Old chestnut groves the haunt of drowsy cows,
Full-uddered kine chewing a sleepy cud;
Or, at the gate, around the dripping trough,
Docile and lowing, waiting the milking-time.
Lanes where the wild-rose blooms, murmurous with bees,
The bumble-bee tumbling their frowsy heads,
Rumbling and raging in the bell-flower's bells,
Drunken with honey, singing himself asleep.
Old in romance a shadowy belt of woods.
A house, wide-porched, before which sweeps a lawn
Gray-boled with beeches and where elder blooms.
And on the lawn, whiter of hand than milk,
And sweeter of breath than is the elder bloom,
A woman with a wild-rose in her hair.
LOVE AND A DAY[46]
[From The Poems of Madison Cawein (Indianapolis, 1907, v. ii)]
I
In girandoles and gladioles
The day had kindled flame;
And Heaven a door of gold and pearl
Unclosed, whence Morning,—like a girl,
A red rose twisted in a curl,—
Down sapphire stairways came.
Said I to Love: "What must I do?
What shall I do? what can I do?"
Said I to Love: "What must I do,
All on a summer's morning?"
Said Love to me: "Go woo, go woo."
Said Love to me: "Go woo.
If she be milking, follow, O!
And in the clover hollow, O!
While through the dew the bells clang clear,
Just whisper it into her ear,
All on a summer's morning."