Cawein proceeds to fill the beaker from the summer of a southern land, where
"The west was hot geranium-red,"
where
"The dawn is a warp of fever,
The eve is a woof of fire,"
and where
"The heliotropes breathe drowsy musk
Into the jasmine-dreamy air."
Cawein sometimes suffers from profuseness and lack of pruning, but the music, sentiment, imaginative warmth, and profusion of nature's charms in his best lyrics rouse keen delight in any lover of poetry. While he revels in the color, warmth, and joys of nature, it should also be observed that he can occasionally strike that deeper note which characterizes the great nature poets of the English race. In A Prayer for Old Age, he asks:—
"Never to lose my faith in Nature, God:
But still to find
Worship in trees; religion in each sod;
And in the wind
that breathe the universal God."
SUMMARY
The lack of towns, the widely separated population, the aristocratic nature of the civilization depending on slave labor, the absorption of the people in political questions, especially the question of slavery, the attitude toward literature as a profession, the poverty of public education, the extreme conservatism and isolation of the South, and, finally, the Civil War, and the period of reconstruction after it,—were all influences that served to retard the development of literature in the South.