Poem of the Day: ‘Fides, Spes’

Known for such novels as “My Ántonia,” “O Pioneers,” and “The Song of the Lark,” with their lyric but unsparing depictions of life on the Great Plains, Willa Cather (1873–1947) was a poet as well as a writer of fiction. Her novels, with their concern for place, examine the details of a landscape in both its matter and its moods. Her poetry also dwells in such details. “Fides, Spes” (Latin for Faith, Hope), with its undulant rhythms, trimeter and tetrameter lines alternating with dimeter in rhyming abab quatrains, depicts springtime’s chancy, brief beauty in a climate of perilous weathers, and hints as well at the brevity of human joy.