Hallowmas

Madison Julius Cawein

1865 –

1914

All hushed of glee,

The last chill bee

Clings wearily

To the dying aster:

The leaves drop faster:

And all around, red as disaster,

The forest crimsons with tree on tree.

A butterfly,

The last to die,

Droops heavily by,

Weighed down with torpor:

The air grows sharper:

And the wind in the trees, like some sad harper,

Sits and sorrows with sigh on sigh.

The far crows call;

The acorns fall;

And over all

The Autumn raises

Dun mists and hazes,

Through which her soul, it seemeth, gazes

On ghosts and dreams in carnival.

The end is near:

The dying Year

Leans low to hear

Her own heart breaking,

And Beauty taking

Her flight, and all her dreams forsaking

Her soul, bowed down 'mid the sad and sere.

From The Poems of Madison Cawein: Volume V: Poems of Meditation and of Forest and Field (Small, Maynard and Company, 1907) by Madison Julius Cawein. This poem is in the public domain.

Waste Land

Briar and fennel and chincapin,
And rue and ragweed everywhere;
The field seemed sick as a soul with sin,
Or dead of an old despair,
Born of an ancient care.

The cricket’s cry and the locust’s whirr,
And the note of a bird’s distress,
With the rasping sound of the grasshopper,
Clung to the loneliness
Like burrs to a trailing dress.

Madison Julius Cawein

1913

Halloween

It was down in the woodland on last Hallowe’en,

Where silence and darkness had built them a lair,

That I felt the dim presence of her, the unseen,

And heard her still step on the hush-haunted air.

It was last Hallowe’en in the glimmer and swoon

Of mist and of moonlight, where once we had sinned,

That I saw the gray gleam of her eyes in the moon,

And hair, like a raven, blown wild on the wind.

It was last Hallowe’en where starlight and dew

Madison Julius Cawein

2017

The Vampire

A lily in a twilight place?
A moonflow’r in the lonely night?—
Strange beauty of a woman's face
Of wildflow’r-white!

The rain that hangs a star’s green ray
Slim on a leaf-point’s restlessness,
Is not so glimmering green and gray
As was her dress.

Madison Julius Cawein

1896

Poems

Page submenu block

Hallowmas

More by this poet

Newsletter Sign Up