The life of the English poet John Clare (1793-1864) overlapped significantly with both Wordsworth and Tennyson, and with both Romanticism and Victorianism — to neither of which did Clare precisely belong. The son of a Northamptonshire farm laborer, Clare himself worked on the land, nurturing in himself a deep affinity for it and for the traditional society that had long coexisted with the countryside. He felt the developments of the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions — the draining of the fens, for example, which had defined an entire way of life in East Anglia — as a personal shock. Sensitive and eccentric to the point of incarceration in a mental asylum (the listed cause of insanity was “years of poetical prosings”), he remained nevertheless a straightforwardly devout Anglican, conservative in all his outlooks. Today’s sonnet-like sixteen-line poem, “A Look at the Heavens,” with its complicated rhyme scheme, with beginning and ending couplets that bracket abab quatrains, echoes Psalm 19 in asserting that the heavens are telling the glory of God.

A Look at the Heavens 
by John Clare 

O who can witness with a careless eye 
    The countless lamps that light an evening sky, 
    And not be struck with wonder at the sight! 
    To think what mighty Power must there abound, 
    That burns each spangle with a steady light, 
    And guides each hanging world its rolling round. 
    What multitudes my misty eye have found; 
    The countless numbers speak a Deity: 
    In numbers numberless the skies are crown’d, 
    And still they’re nothing which my sight can see, 
    When science, searching through her aiding glass, 
    In seeming blanks to me can millions trace; 
    While millions more, that every heart impress, 
    Still brighten up throughout eternal space. 
    O Power Almighty! whence these beings shine, 
    All wisdom’s lost in comprehending thine. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.