Madison Cawein - Substratum lyrics

Hear you r o music in the creaks Made by the sallow gra**hopper, Who in the hot weeds sharply breaks The mellow dryness with his cheer? Or did you by the hearthstones hear The cricket's kind, shrill strain when frost Worked mysteries of silver near Upon the casement's panes, and lost Without the gate-post seemed a sheeted ghost? Or through the dank, dim Springtide's night Green minstrels of the marshlands tune Their hoarse lyres in the pale twilight, Hailing the sickle of the moon From flag-thronged pools that gla**ed her lune? Or in the Summer, dry and loud, The hard cicada whirr aboon His long lay in a poplar's cloud, When the thin heat rose wraith-like in a shroud? The cloud that lids the naked moon, And smites the myriad leaves with night Of stormy lashes, livid strewn With veins of branched and splintered light; The fruitful glebe with blossoms white, The thistle's purple plume; the tears Pearling the matin buds' delight, Contain a something, it appears, 'Neath their real selves—a poetry that cheers. Nor scoff at those who on the wold See fairies whirling in the shine Of prodigal moons, whose lavish gold Paves wood-ways, forests wild with vine, When all the wilderness with wine Of tipsy dew is dazed; nor say Our God's restricted to confine His wonders solely to the day, That yields the abstract tangible to clay. Ponder the entrance of the Morn When from her rubric forehead far Shines one clean star, and the dead tarn, The wooded river's red as war: Where arid splinters of the scar Lock horns above a blue abyss, How roses prank each icy bar, While piled aloft the mountains press, Fling dawn below from many a hoary tress. The jutting crags, all stubborn-veined With iron life, where eaglets scream In dizzy flocks, and cleave the stained Mist-rainbows of the mountain stream; Thus you will drink the thickest cream Of nature if you do not scan The bald external; and must deem A plan existent in a plan— As life in thrifty trees or soul in man.