The poet Brad Leithauser has written that Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) was, like John McRae (“In Flanders Fields”) and Chidiock Tichbourne (“Tichbourne’s Elegy”), a poet who effectively wrote one poem.  That poem is Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin,” taken from a longer cycle included in the 1918 collection “The Charnel Rose” and subsequently much anthologized.

Whether or not it is true that the prolific Aiken — author of twenty-eight books of poetry and five novels, as well as many short stories and critical essays — wrote nothing else worth remembering, the voice of his Senlin discloses a character who might have shaken hands with T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, and the poem has a peculiarly memorable lyrical enchantment. The meditative paragraph stanzas, with their predominantly pentameter lines and alternating rhymes, are punctuated by a musically regular abab quatrain refrain, whose tetrameter lines are bracketed by trimeter. It is a song that wanders in its speculations but calls itself back by invoking the immediate, concrete particulars of leaves, stones, and birdsong.

From line to line the striking images locate Senlin simultaneously within the safety of his house and, perilously, exposed on the surface of “a swiftly tilting planet” (a phrase later borrowed by the fantasy writer Madeleine L’Engle for the title of the third novel in her Time Quintet). Senlin’s morning, with its paradoxical sensations of intimacy and isolation, beauty and terror, is the twentieth century’s archetypal morning, whose singer believes that he ascends from darkness but does not know where the light will lead him.

Morning Song of Senlin (excerpt) 
by Conrad Aiken 

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning 
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew, 
I arise, I face the sunrise, 
And do the things my fathers learned to do. 
Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops 
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die, 
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet 
Stand before a glass and tie my tie. 

Vine leaves tap my window, 
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones, 
The robin chips in the chinaberry tree 
Repeating three clear tones. 

It is morning. I stand by the mirror 
And tie my tie once more. 
While waves far off in a pale rose twilight 
Crash on a white sand shore. 
I stand by a mirror and comb my hair: 
How small and white my face! —  
The green earth tilts through a sphere of air 
And bathes in a flame of space. 
There are houses hanging above the stars 
And stars hung under a sea . . . 
And a sun far off in a shell of silence 
Dapples my walls for me . . . 

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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.