Madison Cawein — 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?