Missouri poet Charles Bertram Johnson (1880–1958) spent his life at a remove from the urban East Coast milieu that characterized his more famous Harlem Renaissance contemporaries. His biographical details are relatively scanty. For much of his adult life he was a schoolteacher and a preacher, work that seems to have occupied a great deal of his creative energy. His slim literary output amounts to one book of poems and two smaller pamphlets.  
 
Yet, inspired in youth by the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, he made a modest reputation for himself as a poet. Though he published some dialect poems in the style of Dunbar, as well as some devotional verse, he received recognition (again, modest) for his lyric poems. Introducing Johnson in the 1923 “Negro Poets and Their Poems,” Robert T. Kerlin describes him as a kind of lesser Sara Teasdale, which even admirers of Sara Teasdale might consider to be damning with faint praise.  
 
Still, there’s something apt in the comparison. In today’s Poem of the Day, we see a winter scene, not unlike so many of Teasdale’s, presented in language that is at once simple, direct, and imagistic, but with undercurrents of emotional complexity. Teasdale’s poems often evoke beauty, especially wintry beauty, to highlight the distant but present turbulence of a war-troubled world. Johnson’s “Snow” is a single ababccdd octet, its primarily trimeter lines disturbed by shifts to tetrameter in lines three and seven. After a brief but potent sketch of the winter day, in which the sky itself appears to turn into snow as it falls, the speaker experiences a flash of insight, in which the “shroud” of snow hints at larger threats.  

Snow 
by Charles Betram Johnson 
 
All day the clouds 
   Grow cold and fall, 
And soft the white fleece shrouds 
   Field, hill and wall; 
And now I know 
   Why comes the snow: 
The bare black places lie 
   Too near the sky. 

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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.