With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, with the help of a North Carolina poet, Sally Thomas. 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.

———————————————

Born on March 3, 1878, Edward Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917. Honored as one of the most significant soldier poets during World War I, he had a metrical sense that could make traditional forms — as in the pentameter quatrains of “The Owl” — sound modernist, new, and strange, with feet of varying lengths and deliberate rhythmic stumbles. Thomas wrote often of the English countryside, even finding there expressions for his sense of war’s defeating exhaustion. In “The Owl,” Thomas pictures himself safe at an inn, but an owl’s melancholy call reminds of war’s cost.

The Owl
by Edward Thomas

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.