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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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, The Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.