After Long Grief

Description

Madison Cawein (1865 – 1914) was an accomplished American poet from Louisville, Kentucky. While his talent manifested itself at an early age, Cawein had a lengthy career, and managed to produce more than 1,500 poems and 36 books. His love for nature, also developed in his earlier years, was the major driving force of his inspiration, and this is one of the aspects of Cawein’s writing style that shows fully in his poem, After Long Grief.The poem itself echoes the tone of John Keats – one of the most distinguished poets who was an important influence in Cawein’s life and in his poetry – in many respects, especially with regards to the vivid imagery that After Long Grief paints.The poem is one of regained joy, where the speaker describes a place where he would like to take the reader. The descriptions are powerful and fraught with nature elements that most of Cawein’s readers are quite used to from his many other works of poetry. The lyrical I speaks with great admiration of the place he describes, as if it were a long lost childhood memory that had just dawned on him.There is much to gain from reading Madison Cawein’s exceptional poetry, a feeling of elation and joy notwithstanding. Poems such as After Long Grief will show you why Cawein was so often named the “Keats of Kentucky,” and why he became such a strong influence on authors like T. S. Eliot, as well as other poets from both Europe and the Americas.The poet’s love for nature and his subtle, refined lyrical artifices and metaphors will help readers discover a world within a world as they read his poem, and in many ways it will also help them view that place that the speaker mentions as their own unique understanding of what it feels like to release the grief of the past.