Today’s Poem of the Day, by the Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay (1890–1948), feints at being a sonnet, a solid square block of iambic pentameter held together by its abab rhymes. Only when you count the lines and realize that there are sixteen — four quatrains, not three and a couplet — do you realize what you’re looking at. The poem’s near-sonnet construction, the way it refuses, at the end, to be a sonnet, seems not accidental but integral to the development of its meaning. 

McKay, whose “After the Winter” appeared as Poem of the Day in March 2022, was a lyric poet with Romantic and pastoral sensibilities. His imaginative attachment to the landscapes of rural New England echoes the Virginian Romantic vision which informs the work of his contemporary, Anne Spencer (1882–1975), whose “Life-Long, Poor Browning” ran in this space this past June.

Here, McKay’s sonnet-like poem builds its problem, through its first octet, in terms of the weather. The rain at night, like an unearthly presence, either keeps the speaker from sleeping or simply reflects his sleeplessness. Like a sonnet, the poem turns in its ninth line: “But lo, there was a miracle at dawn!” In the end, though, it refuses the closure of a sonnet’s couplet, just as its lovesick speaker refuses, even in the morning’s glory, to be “transfigured in the day.”