Today’s Poem: The Clouded Morning

Jones Very’s occluded vision

A.H. Wyant, A Cloudy Day, circa 1886 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Clouded Morning

by Jones Very

The morning comes, and thickening clouds prevail,
    Hanging like curtains all the horizon round,
Or overhead in heavy stillness sail;
    So still is day, it seems like night profound;
Scarce by the city’s din the air is stirred,
    And dull and deadened comes its every sound;
The cock’s shrill, piercing voice subdued is heard,
    By the thick folds of muffling vapors drowned.
Dissolved in mists the hills and trees appear,
    Their outlines lost and blended with the sky;
And well-known objects, that to all are near,
    No longer seem familiar to the eye,
But with fantastic forms they mock the sight,
As when we grope amid the gloom of night.

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Last year in the New York Sun, my esteemed colleague here at Poems Ancient and Modern proposed that the Transcendentalists had produced no great poets. In Jones Very (1813–1880), whom the twentieth-century critic Yvor Winters (1900–1968) championed as a better poet than Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Transcendentalism produced, at the very least, an oddity.  

To write about Jones Very is almost inevitably, and not without reason, to couple his already striking name with the word “madman.” Very, who graduated second in his undergraduate class at Harvard, was a literary polymath: a Shakespeare scholar, a lecturer on epic poetry, a tutor in Greek, a divinity student. But he was also insane. His Harvard divinity studies ended in his dismissal from the university, and his eventual institutionalization, for declaring, and apparently believing in all sincerity, that he was the Second Coming of Christ. 

Prior to this breakdown, Emerson had heard Very lecture and had taken an interest in him — as Very’s original literary hero, Nathaniel Hawthorne, had pointedly not done. But although Emerson called Very his “brave saint,” even he found the saint’s behavior off-putting. A late-1830s diary entry reads, “J. Very charmed us all by telling us he hated us all.” Elsewhere Emerson described Very’s capacity for turning any social gathering into a wake. Conversation “stops,” Emerson wrote, “as if there were a corpse in the room.” Nevertheless, on Very’s release from the insane asylum, Emerson arranged for the publication of a collected Essays and Poems, which appeared in 1839.

Jones Very, c. 1839 (Wikimedia Commons)

Those poems, like Today’s Poem, bear the mark of Very’s Shakespeare scholarship. Though he innovated within its margins, the Shakespearean sonnet was his single form. Though many of Very’s poems take up religious and mystical themes, the natural scene of “The Clouded Morning” suggests the mental darkness in which its author walked. If, for the Transcendentalists, the singular human mind participated in a universal, sentient presence that permeated the whole natural world, for Very that mind, his own — intensely clouded — extended itself into the world to make a universal climate of its personal human moods. 

We sense this pervasive oppressiveness in the repetition of the b-rhyme through not only the first, but the second quatrain as well, like a weather system that won’t shift. The d-rhyme of the third quatrain, meanwhile, contains a consonantal echo of the second quatrain’s c-rhyme. Even as the poem moves forward, its rhyme scheme impedes that motion, limiting its range. The poem’s eye observes, but that vision is occluded. Though day has come, the sunrise brings no clarity and no light. 

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