POETRY AT MIAMI

Storms and Sunshine

Storms and Sunshine Away with your faces that heaven has clad, Forever and smiles of unmeaning brightness, The gayest Natures are sometimes sad, Nor do noblest hearts always bound with lightness. The cheek that nature has doomed to wear, Forever the same in expressive smile, I never can think, beams half so fair, As the brow that sorrow o'casts for a while. Say who would admire a brilliant Sky, Were it always clad and unchanging blue? Or would ocean's smile delight the eye, Were it mov'd by no Gales that o'er it flew? Ah no! for the eye bedim'd by sorrrow, The beamings of joy, as brilliantly brighten, And the brow the from anger a cloud can borrow, Is the first that the sunbeams of love enlighten. The soul that to friendship beats fullest and strongest, Responds to another as warm as its own, And the heart formed to love the firmest, the longest, Scarce seems to exist, when existing alone. S.

“Storms and Sunshine”

William Rogers Schenck (1799-1832)

The Literary Focus (July 1, 1827, Oxford Ohio), 15.

The first issue of the Literary Focus appeared on June 1, 1827, just two years and seven months after two professors and twenty students met for Miami’s first classes. Issues of the Focus included informative articles, essays, and, in most issues, a few reprinted or original poems.

William Schenck’s “Storms and Sunshine” was the first of two “original poems” that appeared in this first issue (although it was later discovered that it had been previously published in a Cincinnati magazine). The poem poses a question:

“Who would admire a brilliant sky,
Were it always clad in unchanging blue?”

Both of the poems printed in the first issue of the Focus (“Storms and Sunshine” and the anonymous “The Power of God”) consider the power and meaning of storms. Storms were a favorite theme in Romantic writings of the period, which often linked them to inward spiritual tumult, sublime experience, and oncoming revolutionary change.

Home        Next