In today’s Poem of the Day, Mark van Doren (1894–1972) evokes a blizzard scene in flexible blank verse: iambic pentameter that admits the occasional anapest or trochee, even as the blinding whiteness of the visible world still admits some variation. The poem’s speaker, looking out, can discern “a circle of grey shore” with water beyond it. Out of “the further white,” a gull appears, white on whiteness, a flash of movement that disappears, though the speaker can still hear it crying beyond the curtain of snow.

What’s notable about this poem is the way that the speaker’s vision turns continually outward, training itself on the reality of the world outside himself, even though it’s a world he largely can’t see. He writes about isolation without ever mentioning the word or meditating on the condition, except to speculate that the bird, unseen beyond the snow, “may be wanting to return.” Return where? To the field of his own vision? He doesn’t say, and doesn’t know. There’s only the reality of the pathless snow, which is, in itself, enough story for one poem to tell.  

River Snow 
by Mark van Doren 

The flakes are a little thinner where I look, 
For I can see a circle of grey shore, 
And greyer water, motionless beyond. 
But the other shore is gone, and right and left 
Earth and sky desert me. Still I stand 
And look at the dark circle that is there — 
As if I were a man blinded with whiteness, 
And one grey spot remained. The flakes descend, 
Softly, without a sound that I can tell — 
When out of the further white a gull appears, 
Crosses the hollow place, and goes again . . . 
There was no flap of wing; no feather fell. 
But now I hear him crying, far away, 
And think he may be wanting to return . . .
The flakes descend . . . And shall I see the bird? 
Not one path is open through the snow. 

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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.