Poems / by Madison Cawein ; with a foreward by William Dean Howells [electronic text]

NOVEMBER

I

THE shivering wind sits in the oaks, whose limbs, Twisted and tortured, nevermore are still; Grief and decay sit with it; they, whose chill Autumnal touch makes hectic-red the rims Of all the oak leaves; desolating, dims The ageratum's blue that banks the rill; And splits the milkweed's pod upon the hill, And shakes it free of the last seed that swims. Down goes the day despondent to its close: And now the sunset's hands of copper build A tower of brass, behind whose burning bars The day, in fierce, barbarian repose, Like some imprisoned Inca sits, hate-filled, Crowned with the gold corymbus of the stars.

II

There is a booming in the forest boughs; Tremendous feet seem trampling through the trees: The storm is at his wildman revelries, And earth and heaven echo his carouse.

Night reels with tumult; and, from out her house Of cloud, the moon looks, — like a face one sees In nightmare, — hurrying, with pale eyes that freeze Stooping above with white, malignant brows. The isolated oak upon the hill, That seemed, at sunset, in terrific lands A Titan head black in a sea of blood, Now seems a monster harp, whose wild strings thrill To the vast fingering of innumerable hands — Spirits of tempest and of solitude.