Robert Southey (1774–1843) was a minor Romantic poet, a minor author of scribbled translations for money, a minor figure among the great collection of Lake District poets in his time. But he ended up poet laureate of Great Britain — a distinct improvement on his predecessors Henry James Pye and Thomas Wharton, and a transition to the great Victorian poet laureates of Wordsworth and Tennyson. Besides, all of the minor work of Southey added up to something fascinating. In “My Days among the Dead Are Past,” he uses an interesting stanza: a ballad-meter quatrain, capped with a tetrameter couplet. Southey was always good at ballad meter (rhymed four-foot lines alternating with three-foot lines), and although that meter would not be many poets’ first choice for a mortuary poem, the ending couplet helps maintain the grave thoughts of the poet. The dead, especially the great figures of the past, grant us the comfort and wisdom to learn how to live — and how to die.

My Days among the Dead Are Past
by Robert Southey

My days among the Dead are past;
    Around me I behold,
Where’er these casual eyes are cast,
    The mighty minds of old;
My never-failing friends are they,
With whom I converse day by day.

With them I take delight in weal,
    And seek relief in woe;
And while I understand and feel
    How much to them I owe,
My cheeks have often been bedew’d
With tears of thoughtful gratitude.

My thoughts are with the Dead, with them
    I live in long-past years,
Their virtues love, their faults condemn,
    Partake their hopes and fears,
And from their lessons seek and find
Instruction with an humble mind.

My hopes are with the Dead, anon
    My place with them will be,
And I with them shall travel on
    Through all Futurity;
Yet leaving here a name, I trust,
That will not perish in the dust.

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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.