Explore "The Woodpath" by Madison Cawein on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ Here Spring her first frail violets blows; / Broadcast her whitest wind-flowers sows / Through starry mosses amber-fair, / And fronded ferns and briar-rose, / Hart's-tongue and maidenhair.
/ Here fungus life is beautiful; / Slim mushroom and the thick toadstool, -- / As various colored as are blooms, -- / Dot their damp cones through shadows cool, / And breathe forth rain perfumes.
/ Here stray the wandering cows to rest; / The calling cat-bird builds its nest / In spicewood bushes dark and deep; / Here raps the woodpecker its best, / And here young rabbits leap.
/ Beech, oak, and cedar; hickories; / The pawpaw and persimmon trees; / And tangled vines and sumac-brush, / Make dark the daylight, where the bees / Drone, and the wood-springs gush.
/ Here to pale melancholy moons, / In haunted nights of dreamy Junes, / Wails wildly the weird whippoorwill, / Whose strains, like those the owlet croons, / Wild woods with phantoms fill.