(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,
And the birds are on the wing,
And our hearts are patting juba
To the banjo of the spring,
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 without a care.
For we know the world is glorious,
And the goal a golden thing,
And that God is not censorious
When his children have their fling;
And life slips its tether
When the boys get together,
With a stein on the table in the fellowship of spring.
_Madison Cawein_
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.