Today’s Poem of the Day commemorates the September 7 birthday of the American poet Elinor Wylie (1885–1928). In her marvelous poem “A Crowded Trolley Car,” Wylie has an observing passenger meditate on the hands of people standing in a streetcar, holding to the bar and the looped straps.  

The poem, in common meter abab quatrains, turns on the tacit assumption (which has ebbed away from us in an increasingly automated world) that the condition of a person’s hands discloses that person’s station in life: a manual laborer or a man of leisure. In people’s hands, the poem assumes, their individual stories may be read.  

In the various hands of the passengers, however, the poem’s speaker sees a larger story. These hands disclose the human soul in its capacity for despair and hope, depravity and goodness, sin and redemption, encompassing a great mythic sweep of possibility.

In the first stanza, the rain’s gray sharpness suggests, paradoxically, the dry “golden” sand of a Red Sea parting, an escape from bondage. In the second, a glimpsed face, “yellow-pale,” recalls a hanged man: Absolom? Judas? Criminal, victim, suicide? In the third, meanwhile, a row of fingers “tangled” on the bar above the seats evokes the murdered wives of Bluebeard, the fairy-tale villain whose final wife, opening the forbidden room in the castle, discovers her predecessors hung up like sides of beef. This association melts into the image of human bodies as fruit, heavy on the boughs of an orchard.  The final stanza, with its one “brave, unbroken” soul and its closing allusion to the Crucifixion, circles back, like the trolley on its rounds, to the freedom glimpsed through rain at the poem’s beginning.  

A Crowded Trolley Car 
by Elinor Wylie 

The rain’s cold grains are silver-gray 
Sharp as golden sands, 
A bell is clanging, people sway 
Hanging by their hands. 
 
Supple hands, or gnarled and stiff, 
Snatch and catch and grope; 
That face is yellow-pale, as if 
The fellow swung from rope. 
 
Dull like pebbles, sharp like knives, 
Glances strike and glare, 
Fingers tangle, Bluebeard’s wives 
Dangle by the hair. 
 
Orchard of the strangest fruits 
Hanging from the skies; 
Brothers, yet insensate brutes 
Who fear each others’ eyes. 
 
One man stands as free men stand 
As if his soul might be 
Brave, unbroken; see his hand 
Nailed to an oaken tree. 

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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.