Read "Hymn to Desire" by Madison Cawein online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
I. Mother of visions, with lineaments dulcet as numbers / Breathed on the eyelids of love by music that slumbers, / Secretly, sweetly, O presence of fire and snow, / Thou comest mysterious, / In beauty imperious, / Clad on with dreams and the light of no world that we know. / Deep to my innermost soul am I shaken, / Helplessly shaken and tossed, / And of thy tyrannous yearnings so utterly taken, / My lips, unsatisfied, thirst; / Mine eyes are accurst / With longings for visions that far in the night are forsaken; / And mine ears, in listening lost, / Yearn, yearn for the note of a chord that will never awaken.
II. Like palpable music thou comest, like moonlight; and far, -- / Resonant bar upon bar, -- / The vibrating lyre / Of the spirit responds with melodious fire, / As thy fluttering fingers now grasp it and ardently shake, / With flame and with flake, / The chords of existence, the instrument star-sprung. / Whose frame is of clay, so wonderfully molded from mire.