Poem of the Day: ‘Street Light’

Today’s Poem of the Day marks the one-year anniversary of this weekday feature at the revived New York Sun. As of today, we’ve brought our readers two hundred sixty poems, voices from the past and the present, all declaring in their varied ways that poetry in English is a living tradition. A particular poem may distill, within its particular form, a particular set of human experiences or insights belonging to a particular mind, fixed in its time, place, and circumstances, which nevertheless speaks beyond those boundaries. For a particular poet’s mind, the act of setting down those experiences and insights in their form becomes an act of saying, to the rest of humanity, “It’s like this, isn’t it?” And if the poet has done the work well, at least one other person, in all the teeming world and the sweep of time, will respond, “Yeah, you know, sometimes it is.” Take today’s poem, “Street Light,” by the Southern Fugitive poet John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974). As a reader, you don’t necessarily need to know much about Ransom himself — that he was born in Pulaski, Tennessee, that he graduated from Vanderbilt University at nineteen, at the top of his class, that he was a founding member of the literary school known as the New Criticism, that he served as the first editor of the still-august Kenyon Review. What’s important is the poem, which offers itself to you here. You can see that three sestets comprise the whole of it, and that in each of these six-line stanzas, the even-numbered lines rhyme. You can see, moreover, with the speaker, how a stranger may be dazzled by city lights, street after street, light on light on light. You can understand how he might mistake that dazzle for something beautiful and true. You can, with this speaker, approach a woman standing beneath a single street light and, looking into her eyes, observe how they refract whole sequences of light. You can discover, as the speaker does, that none of those lights is the light of the soul, that even where light outshines light, darkness may still prevail. Because it’s like that, isn’t it? Yeah, you know, sometimes it is. Street Light by John Crowe Ransom The shine of many city streets Confuses any countryman; It flickers here and flashes there, It goes as soon as it began, It beckons many ways at once For him to follow if he can. Under the lamp a woman stands, The lamps are shining equal well, But in her eyes are other lights, And lights plus other lights will tell: He loves the brightness of that street Which is the shining street to hell. There’s light enough, and strong enough, To lighten every pleasant park; I’m sorry lights are held so cheap, I’d rather there were not a spark Than choose those shining ways for joy And have them lead me into dark. ___________________________________________ 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.

Poem of the Day: ‘Street Light’

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