Waste Land

Waste Land  

 Madison Julius Cawein

 Briar and fennel and chincapin,
     And rue and ragweed everywhere;
The field seemed sick as a soul with sin,
     Or dead of an old despair,
     Born of an ancient care.

The cricket's cry and the locust's whirr,
     And the note of a bird's distress,
With the rasping sound of the grasshopper,
     Clung to the loneliness
     Like burrs to a trailing dress.

So sad the field, so waste the ground,
     So curst with an old despair,
A woodchuck's burrow, a blind mole's mound,
     And a chipmunk's stony lair,
     Seemed more than it could bear.

So lonely, too, so more than sad,
     So droning-lone with bees –
I wondered what more could Nature add
     To the sum of its miseries . . .
     And then – I saw the trees.

Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place,
     Twisted and torn they rose –
The tortured bones of a perished race
     Of monsters no mortal knows,
     They startled the mind's repose.

And a man stood there, as still as moss,
     A lichen form that stared;
With an old blind hound that, at a loss,
     Forever around him fared
     With a snarling fang half bared.

I looked at the man; I saw him plain;
     Like a dead weed, gray and wan,
Or a breath of dust. I looked again –
     And man and dog were gone,
     Like wisps of the graying dawn. . . .

Were they a part of the grim death there –
     Ragweed, fennel, and rue?
Or forms of the mind, an old despair,
     That there into semblance grew
     Out of the grief I knew?

This poem has been said to have been plagiarized by T. S. Eliot for his Waste Land poem.  I do not see it.  This poem rhymes and does not require massive interpretation to enjoy it, a flaw with the Eliot Waste Land in particular and most of his work in general.   I think that the Cawein is quite the work of art and really hits home.  This is someone coming to grips with loss and the imagery is superb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Cawein