He has so many moving now, And yet they say he can handle twice You take your choice and give me mine, I know the one for me, It's that great bluish one low down It has not moved for a minute or more. The marvel that it can keep As if it had been set there to spin For a thousand years asleep! If I could have him at the inn All by myself some night, Inquire his country, and where in the world He came by that cunning sleight! Where do you guess he learned the trick To hold us gaping here, Till our minds in the spell of his maze almost Have forgotten the time of year? One never could have the least idea. Yet why be disposed to twit A fellow who does such wonderful things With the merest lack of wit? Likely enough, when the show is done And the balls all back in his hand, He'll tell us why he is smiling so, HEM AND HAW Hem and Haw were the sons of sin, Hem lay 'round and Haw looked on Hem was a fogy, and Haw was a prig, Hem was the father of bigots and bores; And Haw was the father of all the tribe But God was an artist from the first, And knew what he was about; While over his shoulder sneered these two, And advised him to rub it out. They prophesied ruin ere man was made: "Such folly must surely fail ! " And when he was done, "Do you think, my Lord, He's better without a tail? "' And still in the honest working world, With posture and hint and smirk, These sons of the devil are standing by They balk endeavour and baffle reform, And over the quavering voice of Hem MADISON CAWEIN EIGHT books by Mr. Madison Cawein lie before me; yet I gather from announcements they contain that several other volumes stand to his credit or debit. The truth is, Mr. Cawein's fluency has done grave injustice to his real talent. He has written far, far too much. Seven-eighths of his work, at a low estimate, had much better have been unpublished. There are marks of the poet in everything he writes-imagination, passion, love of nature, sense of rhythm, and an opulent, not to say extravagant, vocabulary. But in his earlier books these advantages are totally unaccompanied by distinction of style, or even by the most rudimentary sense of congruity in thought and language. He will fly anywhere for a rhyme, and let reason come limping after as best it may. It is quite possible that in the eleven hundred closely-printed pages of his Moods and Memories, Days and Dreams, Red Leaves and Roses, Poems of Nature and Love, and Intimations of the Beautiful, there may lurk poems of real accomplishment, such as occur in his later volumes. I have looked into all these books; but the mind becomes so fatigued in wading through the marish jungle of Mr. Cawein's unpruned, unchastened fancy, that it presently loses all power of discrimination and cannot tell the flower from the weed. On every possible and impossible subject the poet rhymes and rhapsodises. The bent of his imagination is romantic, and he has ransacked every storehouse of myth and legend-Oriental, Græco-Latin, Scandinavian, Arthurian, Provençal, Peninsular, Mexican, Peruvian. His personal, or seemingly personal, lyrics are numberless; he has Browningesque soul-dramas in plenty, and at least one long poem of Tennysonian self-communings in a measure developed from that of In Memoriam. From Keats, from Poe, even from Byron and Moore, he seems, in these earlier books, to have borrowed the obvious and vicious portions of their method. Every now and then we come across a stanza or two which promises a really fine poem ; but the promise is certain to be falsified ere long by some flaccid verse, strained image or grotesque rhyme. In a sequence called One Day and Another (for example) there occurs the following little song, which would be pretty enough but for its fourth and fifth stanzas: BECOMING IMPATIENT. The owls are quavering, two, now three, The owls our trysting dials be- I wait you where this buckeye throws Spice-seeded sassafras weighs deep Behind you you will feel the moon's And here together, youth and youth, Each be to each as true as truth; And dear as fairy fable. |