Poem of the Day: ‘Coyote’

Is there a more faded figure in American literature than Bret Harte (1836–1902)? Well, yes, dozens. (Where have you gone, Carson McCullers? The Southern Gothic turns its lonely eyes to you.) But in the old schemas in which we used to teach Americana, Bret Harte was often mentioned near — albeit trailing — Mark Twain as a writer of the American scene, especially about life off the East Coast. His name would appear prominently as well in literature textbooks’ chapters on the Local Colorists, of whom only Sarah Orne Jewett seems not to have been washed under by the sad tides of time and literary fashion. Still, such stories as Harte’s 1869 “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” and 1868 “The Luck of Roaring Camp” remain small classics, while his satirical poem “Plain Language from Truthful James” was once widely taken as a standard of California comedy. Here, in “Coyote,” he uses tetrameter quatrains, each ending with the same rhyme, to describe a coyote as “A four-footed friar in orders of gray.”