Today showcases a poetic form we haven’t used in The New York Sun’s Poem of the Day feature: the pantoum. This repetitive form comes to us as an import, via the French, from Malaysia, and it consists of a series of quatrains, usually rhymed abab, in which the second and fourth lines of each quatrain become the first and third lines of the next. Typically the poem concludes by repeating the first and third lines of the first stanza as the second and fourth lines of the last.

The form lends itself aptly to obsessive, repetitive subjects, as in Donald Justice’s account of ongoing drudgery in “Pantoum of the Great Depression,” as well as here, in “Another Lullaby for Insomniacs,” by the American poet A.E. Stallings (b. 1968). Sleepless tossing and turning, the relentless treadmill of a mind that won’t shut off: the compelled repetitions of the pantoum, which come around with a sense of frenetic haste (but going nowhere) in these short trimeter lines. The interwoven form calls up all the terrible internal energy of the insomniac, longing for elusive sleep, which makes no promises.

This poem appears in Stallings’ most recent book, “This Afterlife: Selected Poems.” A classicist and translator as well as a poet, Stallings lives with her family in Greece.

Another Lullaby for Insomniacs 
by A.E. Stallings 
 
Sleep, she will not linger: 
She turns her moon-cold shoulder. 
With no ring on her finger, 
You cannot hope to hold her. 
 
She turns her moon-cold shoulder 
And tosses off the cover. 
You cannot hope to hold her: 
She has another lover. 
 
She tosses off the cover 
And lays the darkness bare. 
She has another lover. 
Her heart is otherwhere. 
 
She lays the darkness bare. 
You slowly realize 
Her heart is otherwhere. 
There’s distance in her eyes. 
 
You slowly realize 
That she will never linger, 
With distance in her eyes 
And no ring on her finger. 

___________________________________________ 

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.