The American poet Léonie Fuller Adams (1899–1988), whose “Poems: A Selection” received the Bollingen Prize in 1954, elicited from critics the sort of vaporous praise that so often attends lyric poetry — largely because its themes are hard to pin down without reductiveness. Babette Deutsch, for example, called her “the poet of light,” which makes Adams sound like a kind of verbal Thomas Kinkade. Such phrases as “shy wonder” attach themselves to her poems, in an effort to explain what it is about them that makes them poems worth reading.

Poets are fond of declaring that there are only five ideas in the entire created universe, and the challenge is to make something of them. This sounds reductive, or even disingenuous, but it may point us to some more productive ways of thinking of, for example, our Poem of the Day. 

On the baldest level, “Never Enough of Time” is a poem about treasuring the moment, because we have so few of them. This is one of the five ideas: carpe diem. Here, perhaps, the variation is more like habere diem — hold the day, don’t let go of it — but the idea is still fundamentally that old, familiar trope. What has Adams made of it here? She has made, first of all, pentameter lines in an intricate rhyme scheme, abaccdbdefef in the first stanza, cgfgc in the second.

The moment of experience is held together most of all by its form, a scaffolding inside which a whole world of intense feeling has room to open and show us its landscapes, its winds and waters. In other words, the poet has created a composition, with a structure and order — but in that composition, that work of art, the idea achieves its measure of unrepeatable life.  

Never Enough of Time 
by Léonie Adams 

Never, my heart, is there enough of living, 
Since only in thee is loveliness so sweet pain; 
Only for thee the willows will be giving 
Their quiet fringes to the dreaming river; 
Only for thee so the light grasses ever 
Are hollowed by the print of windy feet, 
And breathe hill weather on the misty plain; 
And were no rapture of them in thy beat, 
For every hour of sky 
Stillborn in gladness would the waters wear 
Colors of air translucently, 
And the stars sleep there. 
 
Gently, my heart, nor let one moment ever 
Be spilled from the brief fullness of thine urn. 
Plunge in its exultation star and star, 
Sea and plumed sea in turn. 
O still, my heart, nor spill this moment ever. 

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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.