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.