Waste Land by Madison Cawein Lyrics

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?