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Title: Substratum
Author: Madison Julius Cawein [
More Titles by Cawein]
Hear you r o music in the creaks
Made by the sallow grasshopper,
Who in the hot weeds sharply breaks
The mellow dryness with his cheer?
Or did you by the hearthstones hear
The cricket's kind, shrill strain when frost
Worked mysteries of silver near
Upon the casement's panes, and lost
Without the gate-post seemed a sheeted ghost?
Or through the dank, dim Springtide's night
Green minstrels of the marshlands tune
Their hoarse lyres in the pale twilight,
Hailing the sickle of the moon
From flag-thronged pools that glassed her lune?
Or in the Summer, dry and loud,
The hard cicada whirr aboon
His long lay in a poplar's cloud,
When the thin heat rose wraith-like in a shroud?
The cloud that lids the naked moon,
And smites the myriad leaves with night
Of stormy lashes, livid strewn
With veins of branched and splintered light;
The fruitful glebe with blossoms white,
The thistle's purple plume; the tears
Pearling the matin buds' delight,
Contain a something, it appears,
'Neath their real selves--a poetry that cheers.
Nor scoff at those who on the wold
See fairies whirling in the shine
Of prodigal moons, whose lavish gold
Paves wood-ways, forests wild with vine,
When all the wilderness with wine
Of tipsy dew is dazed; nor say
Our God's restricted to confine
His wonders solely to the day,
That yields the abstract tangible to clay.
Ponder the entrance of the Morn
When from her rubric forehead far
Shines one clean star, and the dead tarn,
The wooded river's red as war:
Where arid splinters of the scar
Lock horns above a blue abyss,
How roses prank each icy bar,
While piled aloft the mountains press,
Fling dawn below from many a hoary tress.
The jutting crags, all stubborn-veined
With iron life, where eaglets scream
In dizzy flocks, and cleave the stained
Mist-rainbows of the mountain stream;
Thus you will drink the thickest cream
Of nature if you do not scan
The bald external; and must deem
A plan existent in a plan--
As life in thrifty trees or soul in man.
[The end]
Madison Julius Cawein's poem: Substratum
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