Madison Cawein - The Garden of Dreams

How does the Autumn in her mind conclude
The tragic masque her frosty pencil writes,
Broad on the pages of the days and nights,
In burning lines of orchard, wold, and wood?
What lonelier forms – that at the year's door stood
At spectral wait – with wildly wasted lights
Shall enter? and with melancholy rites
Inaugurate their sadder sisterhood? —
Sorrow, who lifts a signal hand, and slow
The green leaf fevers, falling ere it dies;
Regret, whose pale lips summon, and gaunt Woe
Wakes the wild-wind harps with sonorous sighs;
And Sleep, who sits with poppied eyes and sees
The earth and sky grow dream-accessories.

The flute, whence Autumn's misty finger-tips
Drew music – ripening the pinched kernels in
The burly chestnut and the chinquapin,
Red-rounding-out the oval haws and hips, —
Now Winter crushes to his stormy lips
And surly songs whistle around his chin:
Now the wild days and wilder nights begin
When, at the eaves, the crooked icicle drips.
Thy songs, O Autumn, are not lost so soon!
Still dwells a memory in thy hollow flute,
Which, unto Winter's masculine airs, doth give
Thy own creative qualities of tune,
By which we see each bough bend white with fruit,
Each bush with bloom, in snow commemorative.

The frail eidolons of all blossoms Spring,
Year after year, about the forest tossed,
The magic touch of the enchanter, Frost,
Back from the Heaven of the Flow'rs doth bring;
Each branch and bush in silence visiting
With phantom beauty of its blooms long lost:
Each dead weed bends, white-haunted of its ghost,
Each dead flower stands ghostly with blossoming.
This is the wonder-legend Nature tells
To the gray moon and mist a winter's night;
The fairy-tale, which her weird fancy 'spells
With all the glamour of her soul's delight:
Before the summoning sorcery of her eyes
Making her spirit's dream materialize.

Deep in the dell I watched her as she rose,
A face of icy fire, o'er the hills;
With snow-sad eyes to freeze the forest rills,
And snow-sad feet to bleach the meadow snows:
Pale as some young witch who, a-listening, goes
To her first meeting with the Fiend; whose fears
Fix demon eyes behind each bush she nears;
Stops, yet must on, fearful of following foes.
And so I chased her, startled in the wood,
Like a discovered Oread, who flies
The Faun who found her sleeping, each nude limb
Glittering betrayal through the solitude;
Till in a frosty cloud I saw her swim,
Like a drowned face, a blur beneath the ice.

When in dry hollows, hilled with hay,
The vesper-sparrow sings afar;
And, golden gray, dusk dies away
Beneath the amber evening-star:
There, where a warm and shadowy arm
The woodland lays around the farm,
To meet you where we kissed, dear heart,
To kiss you at the tryst, dear heart,
To kiss you at the tryst!

When clover fields smell cool with dew,
And crickets cry, and roads are still;
And faint and few the fire-flies strew
The dark where calls the whippoorwill;
There, in the lane, where sweet again
The petals of the wild-rose rain,
To stroll with head to head, dear heart,
And say the words oft said, dear heart,
And say the words oft said!

I hear the hoofs of horses
Galloping over the hill,
Galloping on and galloping on,
When all the night is shrill
With wind and rain that beats the pane —
And my soul with awe is still.

For every dripping window
Their headlong rush makes bound,
Galloping up, and galloping by,
Then back again and around,
Till the gusty roofs ring with their hoofs,
And the draughty cellars sound.

And then I hear black horsemen
Hallooing in the night;
Hallooing and hallooing,
They ride o'er vale and height,
And the branches snap and the shutters clap
With the fury of their flight.

Then at each door a horseman, —
With burly bearded lip
Hallooing through the keyhole, —
Pauses with cloak a-drip;
And the door-knob shakes and the panel quakes
'Neath the anger of his whip.

All night I hear their gallop,
And their wild halloo's alarm;
The tree-tops sound and vanes go round
In forest and on farm;
But never a hair of a thing is there —
Only the wind and storm.

"I belt the morn with ribboned mist;
With baldricked blue I gird the noon,
And dusk with purple, crimson-kissed,
White-buckled with the hunter's moon.

"These follow me," the season says:
"Mine is the frost-pale hand that packs
Their scrips, and speeds them on their ways,
With gipsy gold that weighs their backs."

A daybreak horn the Autumn blows,
As with a sun-tanned band he parts
Wet boughs whereon the berry glows;
And at his feet the red-fox starts.

The leafy leash that holds his hounds
Is loosed; and all the noonday hush
Is startled; and the hillside sounds
Behind the fox's bounding brush.

When red dusk makes the western sky
A fire-lit window through the firs,
He stoops to see the red-fox die
Among the chestnut's broken burs.

Then fanfaree and fanfaree,
Down vistas of the afterglow
His bugle rings from tree to tree,
While all the world grows hushed below.

Like some black host the shadows fall,
And darkness camps among the trees;
Each wildwood road, a Goblin Hall,
Grows populous with mysteries.

Night comes with brows of ragged storm,
And limbs of writhen cloud and mist;
The rain-wind hangs upon her arm
Like some wild girl that will be kissed.

By her gaunt hand the leaves are shed
Like nightmares an enchantress herds;
And, like a witch who calls the dead,
The hill-stream whirls with foaming words.

Then all is sudden silence and
Dark fear – like his who can not see,
Yet hears, aye in a haunted land,
Death rattling on a gallow's tree.

The days approach again; the days,
Whose mantles stream, whose sandals drag;
When in the haze by puddled ways
Each gnarled thorn seems a crookéd hag.

When rotting orchards reek with rain;
And woodlands crumble, leaf and log;
And in the drizzling yard again
The gourd is tagged with points of fog.

Oh, let me seat my soul among
Your melancholy moods! and touch
Your thoughts' sweet sorrow without tongue,
Whose silence says too much, too much!

Long hosts of sunlight, and the bright wind blows
A tourney trumpet on the listed hill:
Past is the splendor of the royal rose
And duchess daffodil.

Crowned queen of beauty, in the garden's space,
Strong daughter of a bitter race and bold,
A ragged beggar with a lovely face,
Reigns the sad marigold.