A poem from the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum (b. 1959), closes out the Poem of the Day’s week-long celebration of Greek and Latin classical meters in English. Author most recently of “Spending the Winter” and director of the Classics Institute at Dakota State University, Mr. Bottum demonstrates here with both precision and grace how the sapphic stanza can succeed as an Anglophone form.

He suggests the long and short syllables of Latin poetry not only in the patterns of accented and unaccented syllables that form English metrical feet, but also in patterns of long and short vowel sounds. Adherence to Horace’s meter allows the long syllables at the heart of each line — seen geese low and speak strong words — to stand out in high relief, guiding the reader’s mental ear through a line’s cadences.  

Where the voice of Wednesday’s sapphics by Julie Steiner exploits the form’s comic potential, here the meter generates a voice which is both elegiac and resolute. The poem is dedicated to Richard John Neuhaus (1936–2009), author of “The Naked Public Square” and an activist public theologian. The poem’s speaker, thinking of his longtime friend, knows that he admires the activist’s life work — but he sees, with some regret, that it isn’t his own, and that he lacks the ability to do what Father Neuhaus did. Still, there may be other, quieter charisms that speak truth in, and to, a wintering world.