Dawn

The form of “Dawn” is simple: a single quatrain, four lines, that quietly, unobtrusively tackles the drama of a sunrise involving nothing less than the cooperative actions of a mischievous angel and a sleeping being. It is in the irony of form versus subject matter that the poem offers its thematic elements. The position of the poet is humbled against the play of such titanic forces. The poet plays no role in Dawn’s stirring into life. The poet is an observer who shares with a reader a sense of cosmological drama and grand theater in a modest form. Dunbar does not try to elevate the poem by showing off with extravagant formal bravado. He understands the role of the poet is not just to look at the gorgeous blush of the dawn sky but to see it for what it is—a magnificent show of mysterious forces. A simple formal structure, thus, underscores both the poet’s sense of limited input in the face of such power and the poet’s amazement about the display.

The line “Night woke to blush” (Line 3) is both simple in logic and complex in its implications. The rhyme scheme reflects the accumulated precedence of nearly two centuries of British verse that found the real delight of poetry in the tight play of sounds echoing each other. The rhymes are hardly sophisticated: Dunbar forsakes sight rhymes, end rhymes, masculine rhymes, eye rhymes—any of the sound patterns that subtly suggest the lyrical music and sonic appeal of rhyme. The rhymes here are childlike and reassuringly immediate in their easy ear-appeal—“white” and “Night,” and “gone and Dawn.” What could be humbler? The rhyme scheme places the reader in the position of a child, delighted by the ludic word play that opens the mind (and the imagination) to a child’s perception of nature’s wonderment.

The poem follows perhaps the most basic metrical pattern in prosody, one that is closest to the natural rhythms of speech. Called iambic tetrameter, the meter involves four beats to each line: Each line has four units of one stressed and one unstressed beat. The pattern is easy to reproduce: basically, duh DUH, duh DUH, duh DUH, duh DUH. The poem offers no variation nor break from the rigid meter. The pattern makes for easy recitation as the meter matches the most comfortable and familiar metrical patterns—the tick tock of a clock, the cadence of casual walking, or the beat of the heart. The poem uses that most familiar poetic form to suggest the ordinariness of the dawn itself, and to suggest how the rhythm of night to the day is a manifestation of the reassuring predictability of the duh DUH of the tetrameter line. For every tick, the reader quickly learns, there will be a reassuring tock.