If the Transcendentalists produced no great poets, they did produce an oddity in Jones Very (1813–1880).  To write about him is almost inevitably, and not without reason, to couple his already striking name with such words as “madman.” Very, who graduated second in his undergraduate class at Harvard, was undeniably a literary polymath: a Shakespeare scholar, a lecturer on epic poetry, a tutor in Greek, a divinity student of intellectual promise. Yet he was also insane. His Harvard career ended in his temporary confinement in a mental asylum, for declaring, and apparently believing in all sincerity, that he was the Second Coming of Christ. 

Though he was released on the grounds that he posed no threat to anybody, and subsequently took refuge in the Transcendentalist circle in Concord, Massachusetts, Very was never more than an uncomfortable lurker on the fringes of that community. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) had heard Very lecture prior to this breakdown and took an ongoing interest in him. But even Emerson, though he called Very his “brave saint,” found the man’s behavior off-putting. A late-1830s diary entry reads, “J. Very charmed us all by telling us he hated us all.” Nevertheless, Emerson arranged for the publication of a collected “Essays and Poems,” which appeared in 1839. 

Those poems, like today’s Poem of the Day, bear the mark of Very’s Shakespeare scholarship. The Shakespearean sonnet was his single form. Though many of Very’s poems concern themselves with relatively conventional religious subjects, “The Clouded Morning” suggests a Veryesque distortion of a Transcendentalist theme. In his famous treatise, “Nature,” Emerson asserted that the delights of the natural world originated not in nature itself, as a wholly objective reality, but in the man beholding it. “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit,” he wrote. Unsurprisingly, in Very’s poem, nature wears not delight, but perpetual mourning. The darkness of the day seems to emanate from the speaker’s own mind, obscuring any gleam of natural light.

The Clouded Morning
by Jones Very 

The morning comes, and thickening clouds prevail, 
Hanging like curtains all the horizon round, 
Or overhead in heavy stillness sail; 
So still is day, it seems like night profound; 
Scarce by the city’s din the air is stirred, 
And dull and deadened comes its every sound; 
The cock’s shrill, piercing voice subdued is heard, 
By the thick folds of muffling vapors drowned. 
Dissolved in mists the hills and trees appear, 
Their outlines lost and blended with the sky; 
And well-known objects, that to all are near, 
No longer seem familiar to the eye, 
But with fantastic forms they mock the sight, 
As when we grope amid the gloom of night.

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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.