Poet, novelist, critic, and professor Mark Van Doren (1894–1972) numbered among his Columbia University students such literary figures as John Berryman and Thomas Merton. An advocate for liberal education and author of the book by that title, Van Doren was a seminal figure in the Great Books movement and co-founder, with Mortimer Adler, of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. His Collected Poems received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1940. The speaker in this early lyric poem, “Wind in the Grass,” written in rhymed quatrains in common or hymn meter, invites a “weary” listener to find refreshment in observing a small, snakelike movement in the grass, which turns out to be the free and unbounded wind.  

Wind in the Grass 
by Mark Van Doren 

Are you so weary? Come to the window; 
Lean, and look at this— 
Something swift runs under the grass 
With a little hiss . . .  

Now you see it ripping off, 
Reckless, under the fence. 
Are you so tired? Unfasten your mind, 
And follow it hence. 

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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 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.