June in the poetry of Madison Cawein – Excerpts

Herein the dearness of her is:

The thirty perfect days of June

Made one, in beauty and in bliss

Were not more white to have to kiss,

To love not more in tune.

ONE DAY AND ANOTHER. PART I. He waits musing.

O soul, that kept the brook’s glad flow,

The glad brook’s word to sun and moon,

What dost thou here where song lies low

As all the dreams of June?

BARE BOUGHS

Your heart’s a-tune with April and mine a-tune with June,

So let us go a-roving beneath the summer moon:

Oh, was it in the sunlight, or was it in the rain,

We met among the blossoms within the locust lane?

All that I can remember’s the bird that sang aboon,

And with its music in our hearts we’ll rove beneath the moon.

VAGABONDS

Beautiful-bosomed, O Night, in thy noon

Move with majesty onward! soaring, as lightly

As a singer may soar the notes of an exquisite tune,

The stars and the moon

Through the clerestories high of the heaven, the firmament’s halls:

Under whose sapphirine walls,

June, hesperian June,

Robed in divinity wanders. Daily and nightly

The turquoise touch of her robe, that the violets star,

The silvery fall of her feet, that lilies are,

Fill the land with languorous light and perfume.–

Is it the melody mute of burgeoning leaf and of bloom?

The music of Nature, that silently shapes in the gloom

Immaterial hosts

Of spirits that have the flowers and leaves in their keep,

Whom I hear, whom I hear?

With their sighs of silver and pearl?

Invisible ghosts,–

Each sigh a shadowy girl,–

Who whisper in leaves and glimmer in blossoms and hover

In color and fragrance and loveliness, breathed from the deep

World-soul of the mother,

Nature; who over and over,–

Both sweetheart and lover,–

Goes singing her songs from one sweet month to the other.

BEAUTIFUL-BOSOMED, O NIGHT, I