Today’s Poem: The Loon

Lew Sarett’s American wilderness

Magnus von Wright, Great Northern Loon (unfinished), 1836 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Loon

by Lew Sarett

A lonely lake, a lonely shore,
A lone pine leaning on the moon;
All night the water-beating wings
Of a solitary loon.

With mournful wail from dusk to dawn
He gibbered at the taunting stars,—
A hermit-soul gone raving mad,
And beating at his bars.

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Lew Sarett (1888–1954), born Lewis Zaratsky, the son of Polish and Lithuanian immigrants, exemplifies a uniquely American, uniquely early-20th-century type of Renaissance Man. Born in Chicago but brought up for many years in Michigan, he developed an affinity for the upper Midwestern wilderness, as later he would come to love the Mountain West. A 1911 graduate of Beloit College, he was a cheerleader and excelled at public speaking, twice winning the Wisconsin State Oratorical Championship.

In 1913, he underwent what seems to have been one of those trajectory-altering accidents of circumstance. On the strength, apparently, of his undergraduate success as an orator, he was offered a position as assistant professor of public speaking at the University of Illinois, where he was a law student, having transferred there after a year at Harvard. The next year, still in law school, he moved to an assistant professorship in English. Although he finished the law degree in 1916, he would spend the rest of his life in academia, teaching English eventually at Northwestern and writing books on the principles of public speaking. 

In addition to all that, Sarett lived for some time among the Chippewa on Lake Superior, receiving from them the name “Lone Caribou.” During the summers, when he wasn’t teaching, he worked as a park ranger and wilderness guide in Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota, and parts of Canada. He served as advisor to the Department of the Interior, on affairs relating to Native American cultures. And in whatever other spare time he had, he developed several new, award-winning species of dahlia.

A candid photograph of Lew Sarett, c. 1926 (Jim Craig)

Today’s Poem, “The Loon,” appeared originally, in 1920, not in a standard literary magazine but in American Forestry. Sarett also included the poem in his collection, Many Many Moons, published the same year. The poem reflects, within its compressed parameters,  an intensity of engagement with the natural world that recalls Wordsworthian Romanticism. At the same time, Sarett’s view of the wilderness reflects the stripped-down influence of Imagism. His Romanticism is both American and modern, his wilderness frightening in its solitude.

The poem’s two abcb quatrains, three lines of tetrameter with a trimeter conclusion, render in terse but mesmerizingly repetitive language a stark natural scene. The first minimalist quatrain sketches, as a list, the elements of the scene’s pervasive loneliness — a loneliness that to the Romantic mind might seem more attractive than not.

The second quatrain, however, sharpens the emotional focus even as its syntax resolves into a full sentence. This is where the poem is going: to a place of isolation whose solitude, after all, offers no balm for the soul. The sparse haunting landscape, the cry of the loon, might simply be beautiful. But as the speaker’s mind mediates what he sees and hears, that solitude becomes not a balm, but a madman’s prison. 

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