Arthur Stringer, a Canadian-born poet and novelist born in 1874, wrote “The Day” in an era when lyric poetry often turned to landscapes and seasons to voice inward experience. Stringer moved between Ontario and New York, working across fiction, journalism, and the early film industry, but his verse is especially attuned to the way a single day can hold an entire emotional season. In this poem, the speaker waits for “she”—perhaps a beloved, perhaps summer itself—and the landscape becomes a mirror for that waiting. The central idea is both simple and piercing: the thing most longed for arrives only briefly, and its leaving changes the whole world.
The first movement is built on hushed, incantatory expectation. The speaker does not describe the beloved directly; instead, he questions the lawn-slopes, the sea-line, the birch-leaves. “Is this the day she comes?” he asks, and the repetition of “Dewy, dewy,” “Silvery, silvery,” and “murmurous, murmurous” gives the opening a prayer-like rhythm. There is no regular rhyme, but the lines carry a soft music through doubled adjectives and liquid consonants. Nature is not merely a backdrop here—it is addressed as a living participant: “O wild-flower face of Morning, / Must you never wake?” Even the thrush and the white-throat are commanded to “Sing as you have never sung,” as though joy could be compelled into being. Beneath the hopefulness, though, that question “Must you never wake?” already trembles with doubt.
The second half of the poem turns that doubt into elegy. The same landscape remains, but its colors and sounds have thinned: “lone green,” “grey light,” “mournful stir of birch-leaves.” The thrush’s note is now “thin,” and the white-throats call with trouble across the afternoon. Stringer does not show the woman’s arrival or describe the moment of meeting. The poem leaps from anticipation to absence, leaving the central event invisible. That gap is the poem’s real power—loss is felt not as an action but as an aftermath. The speaker reveals only that “she who came an hour ago / Has gone again.” The exclamation mark after “Across the afternoon!--” signals the shift from waiting to remembering, and the repeated “Has gone again-- / Has gone!” closes the poem with a thud of finality.
Key words chart the emotional arc. Early words like “dewy,” “silvery,” “whispering,” and “white-throat” are fresh, bright, and full of movement. They belong to morning and possibility. By the end, “lone,” “grey,” “mournful,” “thin,” and “troubled” drain that brightness away. Summer is declared over, the season closed, and the phrase “for us” widens the loss beyond a single speaker to include every living thing that waited in the grass and leaves. The poem is significant because it compresses an entire season of hope and grief into two brief musical movements. It never tells us who “she” is, and that is why she feels so universal—she is the hour of arrival that cannot stay, the warmth that leaves the landscape grey, the song that turns thin once the singer has gone.