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Home > Authors Index > Browse all available works of Madison Julius Cawein > Text of Old House

A poem by Madison Julius Cawein

The Old House

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Title:     The Old House
Author: Madison Julius Cawein [More Titles by Cawein]

Quaint and forgotten, by an unused road,
An old house stands: around its doors the dense
Blue iron-weeds grow high;
The chipmunks make a highway of its fence;
And on its sunken flagstones slug and toad
Silent as lichens lie.

The timid snake upon its hearth's cool sand
Sleeps undisturbed; the squirrel haunts its roof;
And in the clapboard sides
Of closets, dim with many a spider woof,
Like the uncertain tapping of a hand,
The beetle-borer hides.

Above its lintel, under mossy eaves,
The mud-wasps build their cells; and in the floor
Of its neglected porch
The black bees nest. Through each deserted door,
Vague as a phantom's footsteps, steal the leaves,
And dropped cones of the larch.

But come with me when sunset's magic old
Transforms the ruin of that ancient house;
When windows, one by one,--
Like age's eyes, that youth's love-dreams arouse,--
Grow lairs of fire; and glad mouths of gold
Its wide doors, in the sun.

Or let us wait until each rain-stained room
Is carpeted with moonlight, pattened oft
With the deep boughs o'erhead;
And through the house the wind goes rustling soft,
As might the ghost--a whisper of perfume--
Of some sweet girl long dead.


[The end]
Madison Julius Cawein's poem: Old House

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