Jessie B. Rittenhouse, ed. (1869–1948). The Little Book of Modern Verse. 1917.
Madison Cawein
Under Arcturus
With baldricked blue I gird the noon,
And dusk with purple, crimson-kissed,
White-buckled with the hunter’s-moon.
“Mine is the frost-pale hand that packs
Their scrips, and speeds them on their ways,
With gypsy gold that weighs their backs.”
As with a sun-tanned hand he parts
Wet boughs whereon the berry glows;
And at his feet the red fox starts.
Is loosed; and all the noonday hush
Is startled; and the hillside sounds
Behind the fox’s bounding brush.
A fire-lit window through the firs,
He stoops to see the red fox die
Among the chestnut’s broken burrs.
His bugle sounds; the world below
Grows hushed to hear; and two or three
Soft stars dream through the afterglow.
And blackness camps among the trees;
Each wildwood road, a Goblin Hall,
Grows populous with mysteries.
And limbs of writhen cloud and mist;
The rain-wind hangs upon his arm
Like some wild girl who cries unkissed.
In headlong troops and nightmare herds;
And, like a witch who calls the dead,
The hill-stream whirls with foaming words.
Dark fear—like his who cannot see,
Yet hears, lost in a haunted land,
Death rattling on a gallow’s-tree.
Whose mantles stream, whose sandals drag,
When in the haze by puddled ways
The gnarled thorn seems a crooked hag.
And woodlands crumble, leaf and log;
And in the drizzling yard again
The gourd is tagged with points of fog.
The woods’ dim dreams, and come in touch
With melancholy, sad of tongue
And sweet, who says so much, so much.