“Dawn” is both of and against its culture. Dunbar’s era closed out the great century of scientific advancement, given to embracing the prominence of science with its efforts to disenchant the natural world into predictability through the pull of explanation and convincing logic of formulas.

Against a culture that had valorized the work of scientists determined to explain natural phenomena using meticulous observation and applying analysis to provide a sense of causality to every natural manifestation from storms to rainbows, Dunbar returns to a mindset with its ancient roots when those scientists—really more philosophers and theologians—explained the same natural phenomena using often capricious, sometimes malevolent activities of gods and other supranatural beings. The riot of colors in the sky at morning is more than the expression of the basic laws of light refraction and planetary motion. To a culture growing ever more reliant on explanation, causality, and reason, Dunbar reinfuses nature with wonder.

Although the poem—a tidy four lines with the rhythmic feel and elementary rhyming scheme capturing the nursery rhyme feel of children’s verse (Dunbar published several volumes of children’s verse)—evokes less the feeling and argument of nursery rhymes and more the feel of classical verses in which poets surveyed the puzzling evidence of nature and sought to create a logical explanation for such phenomena through evoking the gods.