Madison Julius Cawein Poems

We tightened stirrup; buckled rein;
Looked to our saddle-girths again;
Shook hands all round; then mounted.
The gate swung wide: we said, 'Good-bye.'
...

There's a bug at night that goes
Drowsily down the garden ways;
Lumberingly above the rose,
And above the jasmine sprays;
Bumping, bungling, buzzing by,
Falling finally, to crawl
...

It's 'Gallop and go!' and 'Slow, now, slow!'
With every man in this life below
But the things of this world are a fleeting show.
...

Her rain-kissed face is fresh as rain,
Is cool and fresh as a rain-wet leaf;
She glimmers at my window-pane,
And all my grief
Becomes a feeble rushlight, seen no more
When the gold of her gown sweeps in my door.
...

I heard the toads and frogs last night
When snug in bed, and all was still;
I lay and listened there until
It seemed a church where one, with might,
Was preaching high and very shrill:
'The will of God!
The will of God!'
...

The road leads up a hill through many a brake,
Blueberry and barberry, bay and sassafras,
By an abandoned quarry, where, like glass,
A round pool lies; an isolated lake,
A mirror for what presences, that make
...

March set heel upon the flowers,
Trod and trampled them for hours:
But when April's bugles rang,
Up their starry legions sprang,
Radiant in the sun-shot showers.
...

It is not well
For me to dwell
On what upon that day befell,
On that dark day of fall befell;
When through the landscape, bowed and bent,
With Love and Death I slowly went,
And wild rain swept the firmament.
...

Hey, little boy, little boy, come to me!
Hey, little boy, little boy, Andy!
Hey, little boy, little boy, can it be
Your mouth is crumbed with candy?'
...

Amber and emerald, cairngorm and chrysoprase,
Stream through the autumn woods, scatter the beech-wood ways:
Ways where the wahoo-bush brightens with scarlet;
And where the aster-stalk lifts its last starlet.
...