Though hardly a household name today, Scudder Middleton (1888–1959) rose to brief prominence as a writer, publishing three books of poetry in 1917, 1919, and 1927. His short story, “The Flames of Sacrifice,” became the 1917 silent film “The Love That Lives.” He also reputedly conducted a brief love affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, one mark of his serious arrival on the Greenwich Village literary scene.

By the end of the 1920s, however, his fund of verse seems to have exhausted itself. In the 1930s, according to the cartoonist Michael Maslin, Middleton worked in the New Yorker’s art department as a “hand holder,” relaying rejections from the art editor to unfortunate cartoonists, mediating terms of publication with luckier ones whose work was accepted. Later he moved into a series of editorial positions, mostly at magazines related to theater and film. In literary circles, his name fell out of currency.

But as a young man, in his twenties and thirties, Scudder Middleton proved a genuinely good poet. Today’s Poem of the Day, “Song in the Key of Autumn,” published in the Century in 1920, exhibits the early twentieth century’s fluid relationship with traditional rhyme and meter. As its title suggests, this poem has the improvisational feel of a jazz composition.

In lines that swell and shrink from tetrameter to trimeter to pentameter to trimeter again, each of the three stanzas first resists the impulse to rhyme before falling into it, as a resolution for each movement of the poem.  The thematic ebb and flow moves the reader from an autumnal present to a recollected summer of impossible promises, then back again to the falling leaves, the sadder-but-wiser epiphany, the bitter truth that promises don’t keep themselves.  

Song in the Key of Autumn 
by Scudder Middleton 

We are walking with the month 
To a quiet place. 
See, only here and there the gentians stand! 
Tonight the homing loon 
Will fly across the moon, 
Over the tired land.  

We were the idlers and the sowers, 
The watchers in the sun, 
The harvesters who laid away the grain. 
Now there’s a sign in every vacant tree, 
Now there’s a hint in every stubble field, 
Something we must not forget 
When the blossoms fly again. 

Give me your hand! 
There were too many promises in June. 
Human-tinted buds of spring 
Told only half the truth. 
The withering leaf beneath our feet, 
That wrinkled apple overhead, 
Say more than vital boughs have said 
When we went walking 
In this growing place.  
There is something in this hour  
More honest than a flower  
Or laughter from a sunny face. 

___________________________________________ 

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.