Today we remember John Erskine (1879–1951) chiefly as the author of a 1915 essay, “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent,” first read before the Phi Beta Kappa society at Amherst College, where Erskine then taught. As a corollary, we remember Erskine next as one of the cohort of educators, including also Mortimer Adler and Mark van Doren, responsible for what we know today as Honors College and Great Books programs in higher education. We might not so quickly recall that Erskine was also a pianist and composer. And like Mark van Doren, whose “Wind in the Grass” and  “River Snow” have appeared in this space — indeed, like just about anyone of his generation, but with a sensitive ear and a gift for compressed poetic drama — he could write verse.

Today’s Poem of the Day, “Apparation,” appeared in 1920, first in Harper’s Magazine, then in an anthology of “Magazine Verse” for that year, edited by William Stanley Braithwaite (1878–1962). There, Erskine appears in a catalog of literary names both famous and forgotten: Robert Frost, Conrad Aiken, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, but also Aloysius Coll, Gordon Malherbe Hillman, Howard Mumford Jones, and Myrtle Eberstein. In short, 1920 as a year for magazine verse was, on many levels, a mixed bag.

But like Scudder Middleton (1888–1959), whose “Song in the Key of Autumn” featured as Poem of the Day last October 18, Erskine emerges from this crowd as something of a surprise. His “Apparition” is a poem you run your eye over, one of a hundred anthology pieces. Then something about it makes you stop and read it again. Its easy iambic-pentameter quatrains, despite their occasionally mannered moments — “I am come home,” said nobody in the twentieth century — build a Twilight-Zone-ish scene of return and recognition. Yet what the speaker recognizes, poignantly, at the poem’s end, is that he and the one he loves are strangers, no more than phantoms to each other. Everything familiar is a cold and alien land.  

Apparition
by John Erskine

I walked my fastest down the twilight street;
Sometimes I ran a little, it was so late.
At first the houses echoed back my feet,
Then the path softened just before our gate.
Even in the dusk I saw, even in my haste,
Lawn-tracks and gravel-marks. “That’s where he plays;
The scooter and the cart these lines have traced,
And Baby wheels her doll here, sunny days.”
Our door was open; on the porch still lay
Ungathered toys; our hearth-light cut the gloam;
Within, round table-candles, you — and they.
And I called out, I shouted, “I am come home!”
At first you heard not, then you raised your eyes,
Watched me a moment — and showed no surprise.
Such dreams we have had often, when we stood
Thought-struck amid the merciful routine,
And distance more than danger chilled the blood,
When we looked back and saw what lay between;
Like ghosts that have their portion of farewell,
Yet will be looking in on life again,
And see old faces, and have news to tell,
But no one heeds them; they are phantom men.
Now home indeed, and old loves greet us back.
Yet — shall we say it? — something here we lack,
Some reach and climax we have left behind.
And something here is dead, that without sound
Moves lips at us and beckons, shadow-bound,
But what it means, we cannot call to mind.

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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 are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.