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Show MADELYN CANNON STEWART SILVER 50 the sounds of hawk and river and frogs at evening and finds in them peace. DUSK The earth pauses soft, to listen, In the mystic half-an-hour, To the call of a wheeling hawk in sky, To the murmur of waters rippling by, To the twang of the frog's dusk lullaby The earth pauses soft, to listen. The earth fills her nostrils, gently. Of the fragrant evening air, And each breath is a breeze To cool sun-weary trees, Tired longings a ppease- The earth fills her nostrils, gently. The movement of this stanza varies with the subject, describ variously the smooth motion of the "wheeling hawk" and ing the gusty "breath" of the breeze. The stanzas make use of dif ferent senses-the first, hearing, with the sounds of a hawk's The second, smell and cry, murmuring water, a frog's song. the fragrance of the evening air and how its breezes cool touch, the sun-heated trees. Madelyn's prose is sometimes as poetic as her verse, as in this paragraph from a letter to her friend Louise Richards: "When I look at the superb mountains and valleys, the trees and the sky-the charm and delicacy of the stars, the the birds-when I feel young new moon, the wild flowers and my horse leaping along under me, sensitive to every touch of my hand on the rein, I feel that truly God is good. I feel then that life is stretching gloriously before me and I want to go gloriously to meet it!"" Clearly, Madelyn Stewart's upbringing pulled her in two directions-first toward leadership in a social world and second toward expression of her thoughts about nature, art, and beau- |
