Poem of the Day: ‘Prosody’
Today begins a week of work from living poets — and who better to start with than Rhina Espaillat? She is the godmother of the New Formalism, the attempt to reintroduce formal meter and rhyme into poetry.
For its Poem of the Day feature, The New York Sun begins today a week of work from living poets — and who better to start with than Rhina Espaillat? Born in 1932 at Santo Domingo, she is the godmother of the New Formalism, the attempt to reintroduce formal meter and rhyme into poetry. Her English-language books run from “Where Horizons Go” (1998) to “The Field” (2019), and her translations include widely acclaimed renderings of St. John of the Cross into English, and Robert Frost into Spanish. In “Prosody,” she describes the metrical music of poetry as deeper even than the meaning of the words.
Prosody
By Rhina P. Espaillat
The words are what I know,
but they are no comfort.
The comfort is in the music
that says what I cannot know.
The words are what I use
to make a map of the one place
there is, but it’s the music
takes me where I want to go.
The words are addresses,
but the things that live in them
have always just moved, and can be reached,
if at all, through the music.
The words are a name
for the shadow I dress in.
The radiance that wears me
answers only to the music.
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