Dawn

“Dawn” is both of and against its culture. Dunbar’s era closed out the great century of scientific advancement, given to embracing the prominence of science with its efforts to disenchant the natural world into predictability through the pull of explanation and convincing logic of formulas.

Against a culture that had valorized the work of scientists determined to explain natural phenomena using meticulous observation and applying analysis to provide a sense of causality to every natural manifestation from storms to rainbows, Dunbar returns to a mindset with its ancient roots when those scientists—really more philosophers and theologians—explained the same natural phenomena using often capricious, sometimes malevolent activities of gods and other supranatural beings. The riot of colors in the sky at morning is more than the expression of the basic laws of light refraction and planetary motion. To a culture growing ever more reliant on explanation, causality, and reason, Dunbar reinfuses nature with wonder.

Although the poem—a tidy four lines with the rhythmic feel and elementary rhyming scheme capturing the nursery rhyme feel of children’s verse (Dunbar published several volumes of children’s verse)—evokes less the feeling and argument of nursery rhymes and more the feel of classical verses in which poets surveyed the puzzling evidence of nature and sought to create a logical explanation for such phenomena through evoking the gods. Such poetry suggested that even the most unremarkable expressions of nature reveal the activities of forces greater than humanity. Without recourse to laws of gravity, optics, and horology, the poem elevates a simple sunrise to a grand manifestation of entities: a white-robed angel and a reclining creature called Night. This makes a simple event something theatrical, worth nothing, and worth admiring.

Dunbar is no fool: Like every educated person of his generation he understood the science of predictable planetary behavior, but unlike many of such informed people, Dunbar—as a poet—understood the dire implications of science and offers a chance to reclaim the wonder and luster of possibility science rendered at best quaint and at worst delusional.

Drawing on the ancient sensibility often evoked by the British Romantic poets Dunbar studied and admired, Dunbar offers grandeur to a generation enamored with the promise of science to decode the cosmos into a simple universe. Dawn, Dunbar offers, is an expression of a sleeping Night gently kissed into a blush by some angelic sprite. Speaking to a post-Enlightenment world now too savvy to buy into such an extravagantly imaginative narrative, the poem becomes a cautionary poem. Humanity gained explanation, but at what cost?

If the poem renders some optimistic theme it is that there exists, in the vision of the daring poet, some evidence that the tangible and too-immediate world can still permit expansive thinking beyond what can be verified by data and coded into formulas. Nothing is more predictable than sunrise, says the scientist; nothing is more magical than sunrise, says the poet.

Dunbar asks which sunrise the reader wants: one defined by science and directed by routine and predictability, or one defined by the imagination and directed by wonder, that elevates the colors of the sunrise into majestic play. The poem closes with the figure of humanity, watching the stunning play of sunrise and struggling to do any more than hang a word on it: “Men saw the blush and called it Dawn” (Line 4). Perhaps the saddest words in Dunbar’s brief lyric are “Men saw” (Line 4)—with implications of humanity’s contentment with simple witnessing as opposed to witnessing the world with wonderment and an open imagination.