There's a fate in love and a fate in fight, And whether we're wrong or whether we're right, We win, sometimes, to our wonder. Here's luck! That we may not yet go under! With a steady swing and an open brow But we're clasping hands at the crossroads now And whether we bleed or whether we smile In the leagues that lie before us The ways of life are many a mile And a cheer for the dark before us! You to the left and I to the right, For the ways of men must sever, And it well may be for a day and a night But whether we live or whether we die Here's luck! In the teeth of all winds blowing. UNMANIFEST DESTINY To what new fates, my country, far Compelled to what unchosen end, Across the sea that knows no beach, The guns that spoke at Lexington Knew not that God was planning then The trumpet word of Jefferson To bugle forth the rights of men. To them that wept and cursed Bull Run, What was it but despair and shame? Who saw behind the cloud the sun? Who knew that God was in the flame? Had not defeat upon defeat, Had never marched behind the drum. There is a Hand that bends our deeds I do not know beneath what sky I only know it shall be high, I only know it shall be great. LOVE IN THE WINDS When I am standing on a mountain crest, Ho, love, I laugh aloud for love of you, A STEIN SONG (From "Spring") Give a rouse, then, in the Maytime For a life that knows no fear! Turn night-time into daytime With the sunlight of good cheer! For it's always fair weather When good fellows get together, With a stein on the table and a good song ringing clear. When the wind comes up from Cuba, Then it's no wonder whether The boys will get together, With a stein on the table and a cheer for everything. For we're all frank-and-twenty When the spring is in the air; And we've faith and hope a-plenty, And we've life and love to spare: And it's birds of a feather When we all get together, With a stein on the table and a heart with out a care. For we know the world is glorious, And life slips its tether When the boys get together, With a stein on the table in the fellowship of spring. Madison (Julius) Cawein was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1865, and spent most of his life in the state of his birth. He wrote an enormous quantity of verse, publishing more than twenty volumes of pleasant, sometimes exuberant but seldom distinguished poetry. Lyrics and Idyls (1890) and Vale of Tempe (1905) contain his most characteristic stanzas, packed with the lush, adjectival love of Nature that led certain of his admirers to call him (and, one must admit, the alliteration was tempting) "the Keats of Kentucky." Cawein's work divides itself into two distinct veins. In the one, he dealt with the scenes and incidents of his mountain environment: the sag of an old house in the hills, the echoes of a feud, rumblings of the Ku Klux Klan, the ghastly details of a lynching. In his other mood (the one which unfortunately possessed him the greater part of the time) he spent page after page romanticizing Nature, touching up his already painted lilies, polishing his thinly-plated artificialities until the base metal showed through. He pictured all outdoors with painstaking detail. And yet it is somehow unreal, prettified, remote. Every now and then, with an irritating frequency, he tries to transport his audience to a literary Fairyland; but the reader is quickly wearied by the almost interminable procession of fays, gnomes, nixies, elves, dryads, sprites, pucks, fauns-be they ever so lyrical. In spite of Cawein's too profuse lyricism, several of his pieces will doubtless remain, though it is not likely that the survivors will be the sugared sweetmeats by which his champions (including William Dean Howells) set such store. Cawein died in Kentucky in 1914. |