Poem of the Day: ‘Fog’

Robert Hillyer (1895–1961) is one of the unfairly fading American poets who deserve to live in poetry readers’ collective memory. Last summer we ran his poem “Early in the Morning,” and today we add “Fog,” a poem from 1921.

Like Edward Thomas’s “Adlestrop,” which was the Sun’s Poem of the Day earlier this summer, “Fog” matches Hillyer’s “Early in the Morning” as an example of poetry that seeks what Wordsworth called “spots of time.” John Henry Newman once described what he called the stained imagination, injured by some witnessed vulgarity, like a teenager’s encounter with violent pornography. A spot of time is, in a sense, the opposite: a sight of nature that endures in memory as a redemptive presence, repairing the mind.

As an undergraduate, Hillyer helped form a group known as “the Harvard poets” with his classmates John Dos Passos and E.E. Cummings. He went to Europe in 1917, shortly after graduating, to serve in an international ambulance corps before America entered the war. Hillyer would return to teach at Harvard for many years afterward, writing eight books of poetry and winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1934 for his collected verse. A modern poet while only partially a modernist, he wanted a “conservative poetry,” dubbing himself “a conservative and religious poet in a radical and blasphemous age.”

“Early in the Morning” stays entirely within its moment (except for one ironic nod from the older narrator), but “Fog” has a bigger conclusion to draw from its description of being on a sailboat in the fog. “Where does the sea end and the sky begin?” the poem asks, as a fogbank seals the quiet boat in place. Something more, the line between life and death, is just as uncertain: “The dead are here. / We are not quite alone,” the poem ends. And we are there with the poet in that ghostly fog.