The traditions of English verse, appearing in this space every weekday, are deep and capacious and flexible. They include the earthy medieval lyric, the elegant Renaissance importation of the sonnet, the  Metaphysical knottiness and Cavalier live-it-up-ness of the seventeenth century, the Neoclassical dignity of the eighteenth, the visionary Romanticism and complicated Victorianism of the nineteenth.

These traditions encompass, as well, the vivid and varied voices of American poetry: Longfellow, Whitman, and Frost, to name only three. They include women as well as men, English speakers of many cultural backgrounds and experiences, and poems which, through the work of gifted translators, enter the Anglophone canon from other languages.

For all this variety and vigor, a Poem of the Day reader might start to draw the conclusion that the English poetic tradition is like the communion of saints: everyone in it, while raised to a blessed and glorious immortality, is also dead. That’s why it’s not only our particular pleasure, but also an urgent element of our mission here, to include and illuminate the work of living poets, writing today.

In his famous essay of 1919, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot suggests that the artistic canon is something like a room in a museum, filled with “monuments,” arranged in “ideal order,” which nevertheless rearranges itself into a new order, creating new systems of relationship, whenever a “really new” work of art enters it. This is how a living tradition operates, this tradition that the Poem of the Day offers the reader, every day of the week. 

Today’s Poem of the Day, by Andrew Hudgins (b. 1951), assumes a striking place in that room of monuments, like a cow’s bleached skull among the marble statuary. “Raven Days” forms one installment in Hudgins’ 1987 “After the Lost War,” a book-length poetic narrative whose first-person speaker is the nineteenth-century American southern poet Sidney Lanier. In “Raven Days,” as in all the poems of “After the Lost War,” the fictional Lanier speaks without the stylized music of his own poetry (Sun readers will remember this music in Lanier’s  “The Song of the Chattahoochee,” featured here in early February).

Instead, his voice, channeled through Hudgins’s own, is casually discursive and direct, the sort of voice that makes assertions — “These are what my father calls / our raven days” — then immediately qualifies them with a confession: “I’m not sure what it means.” Formally, the poem leans toward a regular tetrameter, but qualifies that metrical commitment with forays into trimeter and, in the closing line, pentameter.

The poem’s narrative present consists of the “raven days” in the aftermath of the Civil War, in which Lanier had fought on the losing side. But besides engaging with this near-forgotten poet and the historical moment he occupied, the poem in its brevity travels widely in both poetic and scriptural tradition. It takes the raven as a metaphysical conceit for the human condition. It invokes his presence as both omen and means of grace.

The raven’s very ambiguity becomes a figure for a sort of hopeful doubt, which views familiarity with death and the desert — place of deprivation, temptation, and wandering, but also of unexpected divine ministration —  as a “useful” skill set. He is a singular bird, this raven, whose entry into the tradition of poetry in English causes all his literary predecessors, all the black carrion birds of ill omen, to shift on their perches and make room for him. 

Raven Days
by Andrew Hudgins

These are what my father calls
our raven days. The phrase is new
to me. I’m not sure what it means.
If it means we’re hungry, it’s right.
If it means we live on carrion,
it’s right. It’s also true
that every time we raise a voice
to sing, we make a caw and screech,
a raucous keening for the dead,
of whom we have more than our share.
But the raven’s an ambiguous bird.
He forbodes death, and yet he fed
Elijah in the wilderness
and doing so fed all of us.
He knows his way around a desert
and a corpse, and these are useful skills. 

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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.