Today’s Poem of the Day, by Emily Brontë (1818–1848) seems consonant somehow, in tone, with its author’s one novel, “Wuthering Heights.” This is a strange impression, perhaps, to derive from a poem that, like Monday’s poem by the twentieth-century poet Siegfriend Sassoon, opens on a scene of beauty and peace that “Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere.” 

A character blundering into this scene, so neatly set out in plainspoken common-meter quatrains, might be forgiven for expecting to find refreshment and rebirth in the limpid moonlight, the sheltering shadows of the trees. Instead what he finds, in the third stanza, is a corpse, albeit a beautiful one, like the John Everett Millais painting of the drowned Ophelia.  What begins in Romantic impulse ends in a highly aestheticized pathos. 

Moonlight, Summer Moonlight
By Emily Brontë

’Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,

But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.

And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head.

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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.