Coventry Patmore (1823–1896) was a poet, literary critic, friend of the the Pre-Raphaelites, and author of such popular poetry books as “The Angel in the House” (an 1862 narrative poem about ideal marriage) and “The Unknown Eros” (1877). He is also little read these days, which is a puzzle. His conservative personal sense of social life may have contributed, as may his conversion to Catholicism after the death of his wife in 1862 — an event that also prompted his highly regarded poems about grief. The Victorian Age is crowded with British poets of note, from Tennyson and Edward Lear to Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But Patmore deserves his place among them. For one of the lighter poems the Sun offers as the Poem of the Day on Wednesdays, Patmore’s brief and clever quatrain about Victorian courting seems perfect.

The Kiss
by Coventry Patmore
 
“I saw you take his kiss!” “’Tis true.”
“O modesty!” “’Twas strictly kept:
He thought me asleep — at least, I knew
He thought I thought he thought I slept.”

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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.