User:DonnaMarieConn/Madison J. Cawein

Madison Julius Cawein (AKA the "Keats of Kentucky") Born March 23, 1865 – Died December 8, 1914

In 1913, a year before his death, Cawein published a poem called "Waste Land" in a Chicago magazine which included Ezra Pound as an editor. Scholars have identified this poem as an inspiration to T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, published in 1922 and considered the birth of modernism in poetry.

Waste Land

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?