Poems of Madison Cawein Vol. 3 — The Haunted House

I

The shadows sit and stand about its door Like uninvited guests and poor;

And all the long, hot summer day The ceaseless locust dins its roundelay In one old sycamore.

The squirrel leaves upon its rotting roof Its wandering tracks In empty hulls; and in its clapboard cracks The spider weaves a windy woof, And cells of clay the mud-wasp packs.

The she-fox whelps upon its floor;

And o’er its sun warped door The owlet roosts; and where the mosses run, The freckled snake basks in the sun.

II

The children of what fathers sleep Beneath those melancholy pines?

The slow slugs slime their headstones there where creep The doddered poison-vines.

The orchard, near the meadow deep, Lifts up decrepit arms, Black-lichened in a withering heap.

No sap swells up to make it leap And shout against spring’s storms;

No blossom lulls its age asleep;

The winds bring sad alarms.

Big, bell-round pears and pippins, russet-red, No maiden gathers now;

The worm-bored trunks weep tears of gum instead, Oozing from each old bough.

III

The woodlands around it are solitary And fold it like gaunt hands;

The sunlight is sad and the moonlight is dreary, The hum of the country is lonesome and weary, And the bees go by in bands To gladder and lovelier lands.

The grasses are rotting in walk and in bower;

The loneliness,--dank and rank As a chamber where lies for a lonely hour An old-man’s corpse with many a flower,-- Is hushed and blank.

And even the birds have passed it by, Gone with their songs to a happier sky, A happier sky and bank.

IV

In its desolate halls are lying, Gold, blood-red, and browned, Drifted leaves of autumn dying;

And the winds, above them sighing, Turn them round and round, Make a ghostly sound As of footsteps falling, flying, Ghostly footsteps, faintly flying Through the haunted house.

V

Gazing down in her white shroud, Wov’n of windy cloud, Comes at night the phantom moon;

Comes, and all the shadows soon, Crowding chambers of the house, Haunting whispering rooms, arouse;-- Shadows, ghosts, her rays lead on, Till beneath the cloud Like a ghost she’s gone, In her gusty shroud, O’er the haunted house.