Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935) figured significantly in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s. Though prominent as a diarist, journalist, and activist for various causes, she also published many poems and short stories, beginning with “Violets and Other Tales,” which appeared when she was twenty. Today’s Shakespearean “Sonnet” takes up the central image of that collection’s titular story: violets, “dear little human-faced things,” as emblems of recollected joy.

Sonnet 
by Alice Dunbar-Nelson 

I had not thought of violets late, 
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet 
In wistful April days, when lovers mate 
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet. 
The thought of violets meant florists’ shops, 
And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine; 
And garish lights, and mincing little fops 
And cabarets and soaps, and deadening wines. 
So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed, 
I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams; 
The perfect loveliness that God has made,— 
Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams. 
And now—unwittingly, you’ve made me dream 
Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam. 

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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.