Robert Southwell (c. 1561–1595) was a poet and Jesuit priest in the dangerous days of Queen Elizabeth I. Arrested in 1592 on the charge of treason for his Catholicism, he was interrogated and tortured by the notorious Anglican priest-hunter Richard Topcliffe, and hanged on the public gallows at Tyburn on February 21, 1595. (It wasn’t till 1970 that the Catholic Church canonized him as St. Robert Southwell, one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.) A baroque poet of genius, dying too young, Southwell showed a talent for powerful images poured out in the frames of elaborate metaphors. His Christmas poem, “The Burning Babe,” and “Life Is But Losse” are among his best-known works, but today’s Poem of the Day, “Scorn Not the Least,” may be the most archetypal. In four six-line stanzas of pentameter, rhymed ababcc, Southwell argues that lowly things will have their time to flourish, in both nature and human affairs. In the first stanza, he connects the survivors of war to the stars visible only at night. The second runs from fish to insects, and the third from birds to plants. In the fourth stanza, Southwell returns to the human, taking the biblical stories of Aman and Mardocheus (Esther 12:1–6) and Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), and puts them in parallel with the endurance of lowly grass beyond the showy flowers of May.

Scorn Not the Least
by Robert Southwell

Where wards are weak and foes encount’ring strong,
    Where mightier do assault than do defend,
The feebler part puts up enforcèd wrong,
    And silent sees that speech could not amend.
Yet higher powers must think, though they repine,
When sun is set, the little stars will shine.

While pike doth range the seely tench doth fly,
    And crouch in privy creeks with smaller fish ;
Yet pikes are caught when little fish go by,
    These fleet afloat while those do fill the dish.
There is a time even for the worm to creep,
And suck the dew while all her foes do sleep.

The merlin cannot ever soar on high,
    Nor greedy greyhound still pursue the chase ;
The tender lark will find a time to fly,
    And fearful hare to run a quiet race :
He that high growth on cedars did bestow,
Gave also lowly mushrumps leave to grow.

In Aman’s pomp poor Mardocheus wept,
    Yet God did turn his fate upon his foe ;
The lazar pined while Dives’ feast was kept,
    Yet he to heaven, to Hell did Dives go.
We trample grass, and prize the flowers of May,
Yet grass is green when flowers do fade away.

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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.