His biography notes only that he was “Son of Emily Stables, of Inverugie, Haslemere, Surrey, and the late Rev. W.H. Stables, M.A., sometime Vicar of St. Chad’s, Leeds,” and that he was “educated at Winchester and Christ Church, Oxford.” Oh, and also that he was killed in Iraq during the campaign against the Turks in the First World War. Solzhenitsyn and others have insisted that World War I was more historically significant than World War II, for that earlier war was a civilization committing suicide. But to think about such claims requires asking what the lost civilization had been — and really, it looks a lot like this young man: J. Howard Stables (1895–1917). He was not the best of the war poets: not a swoonworthy star like Rupert Brooke, a literary figure like Siegfried Sassoon, a fine observer of war like Wilfred Owen, or a true nature poet like Edward Thomas (perhaps the best of them all). Stables was just a quiet, brilliantly educated young man with a florid poetic sense that was not given time to settle into itself. In “High Barbary” he writes a Petrarchan sonnet about how the landscape of North Africa still reflects the High Barbary pirates who are no more.

High Barbary
by J. Howard Stables

The distant mountains’ jagged, cruel line
Cuts the imagination as a blade
Of dove-grey Damascene.  In many a raid
Here Barbary pirates drave the ships of wine
Back to Sicilian harbours, harried kine,
Pillaged Calabrian villages and made
The land a desolation; here they played
On Glamour’s passioned gamut at Lust’s sign. 

Saracens, Moors, Phoenicians—all the East,
Franks, Huns, Walloons, the pilgrims of the Pope,
All, all are gone.  The clouds are trailing hence;
So goes to Benediction some proud priest
Sweeping the ground with broidered golden cope.
—Go, gather up the fumes of frankincense.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, 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.