A poem from the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum (b. 1959), closes out the Poem of the Day’s week-long celebration of Greek and Latin classical meters in English. Author most recently of “Spending the Winter” and director of the Classics Institute at Dakota State University, Mr. Bottum demonstrates here with both precision and grace how the sapphic stanza can succeed as an Anglophone form.

He suggests the long and short syllables of Latin poetry not only in the patterns of accented and unaccented syllables that form English metrical feet, but also in patterns of long and short vowel sounds. Adherence to Horace’s meter allows the long syllables at the heart of each line — seen geese low and speak strong words — to stand out in high relief, guiding the reader’s mental ear through a line’s cadences.  

Where the voice of Wednesday’s sapphics by Julie Steiner exploits the form’s comic potential, here the meter generates a voice which is both elegiac and resolute. The poem is dedicated to Richard John Neuhaus (1936–2009), author of “The Naked Public Square” and an activist public theologian. The poem’s speaker, thinking of his longtime friend, knows that he admires the activist’s life work — but he sees, with some regret, that it isn’t his own, and that he lacks the ability to do what Father Neuhaus did. Still, there may be other, quieter charisms that speak truth in, and to, a wintering world.   

In Refusal of Politics 
by Joseph Bottum 

         Sapphics for Richard John Neuhaus 

If I have seen geese low on the east horizon, 
seen the long reeds strain in the dawn to follow, 
watched the first clean ice of the season take 
root for the winter,

what worth are those clear scenes in a day that fathers 
lunge at half-born sons with a knife, and daughters 
name the swift-gained deaths of their mothers high 
gestures of mercy?

And they who speak strong words in the failing season, 
sparking new fires, cursing the embers — they must 
scorn the faint hearts nursing a private flame, 
skirting the darkness. 

But still the cold reeds sway in the wind and whisper: 
Leave the great voice raging to stave the winter. 
Autumn’s own soft music has need of songs, 
gentle and dying.

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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.