Poem of the Day: ‘Prosody’

For its Poem of the Day feature, The New York Sun begins today a week of work from living poets — and who better to start with than Rhina Espaillat? Born in 1932 at Santo Domingo, she is the godmother of the New Formalism, the attempt to reintroduce formal meter and rhyme into poetry. Her English-language books run from “Where Horizons Go” (1998) to “The Field” (2019), and her translations include widely acclaimed renderings of St. John of the Cross into English, and Robert Frost into Spanish. In “Prosody,” she describes the metrical music of poetry as deeper even than the meaning of the words.