Lines like these remind us of the greater poet's _The Eve of
St. Agnes_:--
"Into the sunset's turquoise marge
The moon dips, like a pearly barge
Enchantment sails through magic seas
To fairyland Hesperides."
Keats exclaims:--
"O for a beaker full of the warm South."
Cawein proceeds to fill the beaker from the summer of a southern land,
where
"The west was hot geranium-red,"
where
"The dawn is a warp of fever,
The eve is a woof of fire,"
and where
"The heliotropes breathe drowsy musk
Into the jasmine-dreamy air."
Cawein sometimes suffers from profuseness and lack of pruning, but the
music, sentiment, imaginative warmth, and profusion of nature's charms in
his best lyrics rouse keen delight in any lover of poetry. While he revels
in the color, warmth, and joys of nature, it should also be observed that
he can occasionally strike that deeper note which characterizes the great
nature poets of the English race. In _A Prayer for Old Age_, he asks:--
"Never to lose my faith in Nature, God:
But still to find
Worship in trees; religion in each sod;
And in the wind
that breathe the universal God.
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