Today’s Poem of the Day continues this feature’s practice of exhibiting work by living poets who work in traditional poetic forms. Libby Maxey‘s sonnet “December,” first published in Peacock Journal, also appears in her chapbook “Kairos,” which received the New Women’s Voices prize from Finishing Line Press in 2018.

A variation on the familiar sonnet form, “December” integrates the three-quatrains-and-a-couplet shape of the Shakespearean sonnet with the octet-sestet structure of the Petrarchan. Here, an octet of two abab quatrains is both bracketed and bisected by three rhyming couplets, creating the effect of something — a sestet or a third quatrain — disassembled, its pieces reworked into the body of the whole, to make the old pattern new. 

This formal renovation, with its suggestion of renewal, provides a countercurrent to the poem’s subject. In an edenic orchard, and in the long, cold shadow of the Fall, neglected apples hang shriveled on the stripped branches. They have not rotted, and there is something beautiful, if “embalmed,” in the way that they crown the otherwise empty trees. Still, their ripe sweetness has gone to waste. If they are “unfallen” in the most literal sense, they are also winter-blighted beyond redemption.

The couplet in lines seven and eight serves as the poem’s volta, or turn, shifting its vision from the external scene to an interior landscape of “dark reasoning” and the encroaching shadow of despair. The trees are dormant, but still alive, and bear “rough promises of pink beneath the bark.” Despite these glimmers of transcendent hope, however, in which the speaker seeks some comfort, the apples are lost, and the “stubborn dead” stay dead. At the same time, almost subconsciously, through the remaking of its form, the poem intimates the possibility that its world may yet be renewed.

December 
by Libby Maxey 

Forgotten fruit, a winter crown of these 
Unfallen apples on the leafless trees: 
They did not shy from ripening, from sheen 
And russet bloom, from living fairest though 
They shriveled where they sweetened; now serene, 
As all the dormant things, embalmed in snow. 
Spent ornaments, no wisdom would defend 
The fruitless weight these frozen twigs suspend. 
My reason is as meaningless as dark, 
As sinking chill or rising day or small 
Rough promises of pink beneath the bark. 
To bear and to be borne, still borne, is all: 
No lustrous purpose in the lingering red, 
The silent staying of the stubborn dead. 

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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.