Dawn

“Dawn” is grounded in an approach to Nature (always capitalized) drawing from the relationship first defined nearly a century before Dunbar by the British Romantics—most notably William Wordsworth and John Keats, who found in the splendid immediacy of nature a limitless sense of the beautiful.

Nature was considered a pure element: a sanctuary where humans could become reanimated. Wildflowers, mountains, rivers, birds—everywhere one turned, nature delighted, stunned, and even instructed. A generation before naturalists began their methodical work of demoting Nature into nature (lower case), the Romantics sought in the natural world a sense of the miraculous and beautiful. Their every line argued: Do not look at nature, but see it.

In endowing with drama and color and an otherworldly aura an otherwise dreary daily natural event, Dunbar suggests the resilient beauty of nature. His post-war culture had started the drift away from nature as the demands of an industrial market gave rise to cities and dismissed as quaint nostalgia the agrarian culture of just a generation earlier. Nature was receding. Dunbar was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio with a population of nearly 100,000, and then lived for a time in Chicago and Washington D. C.—both metropolitan hubs. Even as poets of his generation—Carl Sandburg, Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, and many of the New York City poets of the Harlem Renaissance—explored the chaotic energy of the city, Dunbar returns poetry to a decidedly 19th century argument: the hushed reverent beauty in the simple and most readily accessible manifestations of Nature—a sunrise.