Today’s Poem of the Day, by the Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay (1890–1948), feints at being a sonnet, a solid square block of iambic pentameter held together by its abab rhymes. Only when you count the lines and realize that there are sixteen — four quatrains, not three and a couplet — do you realize what you’re looking at. The poem’s near-sonnet construction, the way it refuses, at the end, to be a sonnet, seems not accidental but integral to the development of its meaning. 

McKay, whose “After the Winter” appeared as Poem of the Day in March 2022, was a lyric poet with Romantic and pastoral sensibilities. His imaginative attachment to the landscapes of rural New England echoes the Virginian Romantic vision which informs the work of his contemporary, Anne Spencer (1882–1975), whose “Life-Long, Poor Browning” ran in this space this past June.

Here, McKay’s sonnet-like poem builds its problem, through its first octet, in terms of the weather. The rain at night, like an unearthly presence, either keeps the speaker from sleeping or simply reflects his sleeplessness. Like a sonnet, the poem turns in its ninth line: “But lo, there was a miracle at dawn!” In the end, though, it refuses the closure of a sonnet’s couplet, just as its lovesick speaker refuses, even in the morning’s glory, to be “transfigured in the day.”

Summer Morn in New Hampshire
by Claude McKay

All yesterday it poured, and all night long
    I could not sleep; the rain unceasing beat
Upon the shingled roof like a weird song,
    Upon the grass like running children’s feet.
And down the mountains by the dark cloud kissed,
    Like a strange shape in filmy veiling dressed,
Slid slowly, silently, the wraith-like mist,
    And nestled soft against the earth’s wet breast.
But lo, there was a miracle at dawn!
    The still air stirred at touch of the faint breeze,
The sun a sheet of gold bequeathed the lawn,
    The songsters twittered in the rustling trees.
And all things were transfigured in the day,
    But me whom radiant beauty could not move;
For you, more wonderful, were far away,
    And I was blind with hunger for your love.

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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 are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.