Countee Cullen (1903–1946) has appeared in our pages before, with “Saturday’s Child,” a Poem of the Day this past August. He was raised as the adopted child of a Harlem minister before his meteoric rise, through New York University and Harvard, to become a central figure of what came to be called the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, and images drawn from religion occur often in his work. That needs to be carefully phrased. In his highly formal poetry, religious themes appear much less often than do religious figures and images, which he uses to express his non-religious romantic and racial themes.

And so with “Bread and Wine.” Borrowing from the Lord’s Prayer, he ends the first of his two quatrains, rhymed abab, with a prayer for daily bread. And he ends the second with a reference to communion: “Bread’s not so dry when dipped in wine.” Interspersed in this poem from Cullen’s 1925 book “Color” are lines about the struggle to make a living in the day and a spouse’s gift of love in the night that sustains the fighter in the fight for life.

Bread and Wine
by Countee Cullen

From death of star to new star’s birth,
    This ache of limb, this throb of head,
This sweaty shop, this smell of earth,
    For this we pray, “Give daily bread.”

Then tenuous with dreams the night,
    The feel of soft brown hands in mine,
Strength from your lips for one more fight:
    Bread’s not so dry when dipped in wine.

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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.