“Why must you sing of sorrow / When the world is so full of woe?” The question opens Frank Oliver Call’s “To a Modern Poet” as an exasperated but tender appeal. Call, a Canadian poet and professor, published the poem in the early 1920s, when modernism was pulling poetry toward urban grit, industrial machinery, and disillusionment. His poem pushes back, not by denying sorrow, but by insisting that the poet’s deeper task is to uncover and share beauty. The central argument is direct: beauty is not ornament; it is a road, and following it can lighten the soul’s load and lead toward peace.
The first stanza confronts the modern poet with a series of urgent “why” questions. The speaker knows “the ugly and sad” personally: “For the ugly and sad I know.” He is not asking for innocence. Yet he questions the purpose of piling poetry with “railways,” “Iron and Steel and Coal,” and “the din of the smoky cities.” Those capital-letter materials clang heavily against the ear, and the phrase “smoky cities” smells and sounds of exhaustion. The judgment follows plainly: “these will not feed my soul.” Poetry, for Call, must do more than reflect the world’s noise; it must offer something that sustains inner life.
By contrast, the second stanza glows with sensory invitation. The speaker asks for “songs of beauty” to “gladden my tired eyes,” and then unrolls a series of images: “waving forest,” “meadows and sunlit skies,” “childish laughter,” “cradles and painted toys,” “the sea and the brooks and the rivers,” and “the shouting of bathing boys.” The rhyme pairs—“eyes” with “skies,” “toys” with “boys”—create a light, bobbing music, as if the lines themselves are trying to restore energy. The choice of “childish laughter” and “bathing boys” keeps beauty close to ordinary joy rather than distant perfection.
In the third stanza, beauty becomes something hidden and precious. The earth has a “store of beauty / Deep hid from our blinded eyes,” and only the “true-born poet / Knows just where the treasure lies.” This does not make the poet a distant seer; it makes the poet a guide. The speaker asks to be led away from “paths that are ugly” and “the dust of the city street” toward “paths that are fringed with flowers / Where the sky and the meadows meet.” The repeated word “paths” matters: beauty is not a static picture but a way of moving through the world.
The final stanza admits that sorrow cannot be erased. “Sorrow may walk beside me / To the far, far end of the road,” the speaker says, but if Beauty beckons, “Less heavy will seem my load.” That careful admission keeps the poem from becoming merely sentimental. Its closing lines gather the argument into a quiet creed: “the paths of beauty / Lead on to the paths of peace.” The eight-line stanzas move with a loose, songlike rhythm, and the rhymes that close the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth lines of each stanza create a gentle sense of return, as if the poem itself is walking steadily forward.
The poem is significant because it captures a real tension in early twentieth-century literature. Modern poets were right to face industrial life, Call suggests, but they risked forgetting that art also has a consoling and clarifying power. “To a Modern Poet” may sound old-fashioned next to the difficult, fragmented poems of its time, but its simplicity is deliberate. It asks poetry to be not only honest but also healing—a path, as the final image promises, from a noisy world to a place where the sky and the meadows meet.