Today’s brief lyric, like John Erskine’s “Apparition,” our Poem of the Day on August 18, was collected in the “Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1920,” edited by William Stanley Braithwaite (1878–1962). That year, “The Loon” first appeared not in any of the usual literary venues of the day, but, strikingly enough, in a magazine called American Forestry. The poem’s author, Lew Sarett (1888–1954), son of Polish and Lithuanian immigrants, was a uniquely American Renaissance Man.

For many years Sarett taught English at Northwestern University. He was an orator and author of textbooks on public speaking. He also (and here’s where his life story departs from any predictable academic narrative) served an advisor to the Department of the Interior on affairs relating to Native American cultures. The Chippewa, among whom he lived for some time, gave him the name “Lone Caribou.” In the summers he worked as a park ranger and wilderness guide in Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota, and parts of Canada. In whatever other spare time he had, he developed several new, award-winning species of dahlia.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that today’s poem would have appeared where it originally did, or that it would reflect, within its compressed parameters, an intensity of engagement with the natural world. The two tetrameter-to-trimeter quatrains give a picture, in terse but mesmerizingly repetitive language, of a stark scene in which solitude figures ambiguously, at least at first. The first quatrain offers an all-pervasive loneliness, which to the Romantic mind might seem more attractive than not. In the second abcb quatrain, however, the emotional focus sharpens. This solitude, after all, offers no soul-balm. The loon’s cry recalls not peace but a madman’s raving.

The Loon
by Lew Sarett

A lonely lake, a lonely shore,
A lone pine leaning on the moon;
All night the water-beating wings
Of a solitary loon.

With mournful wail from dusk to dawn
He gibbered at the taunting stars, —
A hermit-soul gone raving mad,
And beating at his bars.

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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.