Most love poems claim that their subject is the greatest thing the world has ever seen. Daniel Whitehead Hicky's "So Small a Day" does something more interesting: it admits, almost cheerfully, that the day it celebrates was nothing special, and then argues that this is exactly why it matters. The speaker recalls the day his eyes first found another's, and sets it against the grand moments that history bothers to record. By the end, the small day has outgrown every large one, and the speaker confesses that no words will ever be enough for it.
The opening sets up the contrast with a clever piece of phrasing. History writes with "glittering ink," a lovely image that makes the official record sound showy, even a little false. Against it, the speaker places a day that was "small in the annals of men." The poem then gives that day its true boundaries, and they are not dates or battles but flowers: it was "bound east by daisies, west by pink and gray / Of clover blossoms." Geography has been quietly replaced by meadow. A day is measured the way a field is, with edges you could walk, and the soft colors, pink and gray, suggest an unremarkable afternoon in which nothing seemed to be happening at all.
That is the poem's central turn. The speaker hunts "the farthest caverns of man's mind," the whole stored archive of human writing, and finds no equal to this ordinary afternoon "this side of death." The phrase raises the stakes. Death, the ultimate boundary, is the only thing that could limit the day's brilliance, and even then the speaker only says he will not find its match while he lives. Notice, too, that "shining" is borrowed from the very language of glittering history that the poem began by dismissing. The small day, it turns out, outshines the famous ones.
The form supports this argument. The poem is a sonnet, and a quite traditional one. The rhyme scheme runs ABBA in the opening lines (day, pen, men, gray), continues with CDDC (breath, mind, find, death), and then finishes with a closing pair of EFEF and a final couplet (skies/rose, records/words, though the exact pairings are slightly loose in the middle). The key effect is the couplet: "But for that love no history records / My tongue shall go impoverished for words." Sonnets love to close with a neat, snapped-shut conclusion, and here the neatness is part of the point. The rhymed pair "records" and "words" ties the two ideas together, the official record and the inadequate vocabulary, as if both were failures of the same kind. The meter is mostly a steady, unhurried iambic line, which gives the poem the calm tone of someone who is certain rather than excited.
The second half of the poem raises the temperature. "This I swear" is an unusually solemn phrase for something as gentle as a daisy-bordered afternoon, and what the speaker swears is cosmic: no sun will rise "to light the darkened lantern of the rose," nor will clouds sail "down the waking skies," without the memory of that day attached. The rose as a "darkened lantern" is the most striking image in the poem. A flower becomes a lamp waiting to be lit, so that sunrise itself seems to exist to illuminate beauty, and the speaker's love becomes the reason the lantern glows. The natural world, which began as the humble border of the day, ends up as its audience.
What makes the poem worth reading is this reversal of scale. It takes the usual hierarchy, in which public events count and private ones do not, and turns it upside down with great politeness and no argument at all. It also ends on an honest note of failure: the speaker, who has spent fourteen lines finding words, says that he will never have enough. A love too large for language, remembered through a small patch of clover, is a surprisingly believable kind of romance.