With today’s poem, the Sun begins a week of the Victorians. The Edwardians taught us to despise them as sex-sick hypocrites obsessed with death, and as a result the Victorians have gotten short shrift for over a hundred years, maybe especially in poetry. Even the initial promotion of the posthumously published Gerard Manley Hopkins (and Emily Dickinson in America) had a little of the flavor of “Those stupid Victorians didn’t even know who their good poets were.” The time has come to dismiss the Edwardian sneer and recognize 19th-century verse for what it is: a significant era in the history of English poetry. Take Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), for example. He was minor poet, minor essayist, minor public figure, minor intellectual—minor at so many things that they added up to an outsize influence on the age. In “Jenny Kiss’d Me,” he composes one of the most charming poems of the age, a rondeau describing a visit to Thomas Carlyle’s house, when Jane Carlyle greeted him with a kiss.

Jenny Kiss’d Me
by Leigh Hunt

Jenny kiss’d me when we met, 
Jumping from the chair she sat in; 
Time, you thief, who love to get 
Sweets into your list, put that in! 
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad, 
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me, 
Say I’m growing old, but add, 
Jenny kiss’d me.

___________________________________________ 

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.