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Waste Land
Madison J. Cawein

published in Poetry, A Magazine of Verse
by Chicago: Harriet Monroe, January 1913



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?