Explore "Music" by Madison Cawein on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Thou, oh, thou! / Thou of the chorded shell and golden plectrum! thou / Of the dark eyes and pale pacific brow! / Music, who by the plangent waves, / Or in the echoing night of labyrinthine caves, / Or on God's mountains, lonely as the stars, / Touchest reverberant bars / Of immemorial sorrow and amaze; -- / Keeping regret and memory awake, / And all the immortal ache / Of love that leans upon the past's sweet days / In retrospection! -- now, oh, now, / Interpreter and heart-physician, thou, / Who gazest on the heaven and the hell / Of life, and singest each as well, / Touch with thy all-mellifluous finger-tips, / Or thy melodious lips, / This sickness named my soul, / Making it whole, / As is an echo of a chord, / Or some symphonic word, / Or sweet vibrating sigh.
That deep, resurgent still doth rise and die / On thy voluminous roll; / Part of the beauty and the mystery / That axles Earth with song; and as a slave, / Swings it around and 'round on each sonorous pole, / 'Mid spheric harmony, / And choral majesty, / And diapasoning of wind and wave; / And speeds it on its far elliptic way / 'Mid vasty anthemings of night and day. -- / O cosmic cry / Of two eternities, wherein we see / The phantasms, Death and Life, / At endless strife / Above the silence of a monster grave.