Sherry Chandler

The Kentuckian’s wasteland

Wasteland

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?

— Madison Cawein

1. A Kentucky source influence for Eliot’s “The Wasteland?”
2. Is an “Ode to Joy” currently possible?
3. Shelley
4. Groundhog
5. Jesse Stuart

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