Dimeter (lines with just two stresses) are hard to get right in English verse. Let a weak line slip in, and the listener’s sense of the meter breaks down. Let too many strong ba-boom-ba-boom lines pound by, and the poem turns into bombast or nursery rhyme.

With “Things That Go,” The New York Sun concludes its week of celebration of the poetry of the 90-year-old Rhina Espaillat: a celebration the Sun began back in 1950, 72 years ago. “Things That Go” is as affecting as the grief-stricken “Here,” the Shakespearean sonnet with which we opened our Espaillat week. Yet it is, in its way, even more a technical tour de force, for the soundscape it shapes is delicate enough to pull off the English dimeter that so often goes wrong.

Playing on two sense of “go” — the motion that makes us say a machine goes, and the departure that makes us say the geese go in autumn — Espaillat lists things that go in a play of vowels that speed up (“fan and motor, / mill and train”) and slow down (“desire and / desired thing”), sometimes whispering the second stress (“waterwheel”) and sometimes forcing us to linger over it (“remembered pain”). 

Things That Go
by Rhina P. Espaillat

Hoop and arrow,
wheel and dart,
kite and rocket,
stream and heart;
 
fan and motor,
mill and train,
waterwheel,
remembered pain
 
summer, autumn,
winter, spring,
desire and
desired thing;
 
suns that burn
and rains that weep;
children you once
rocked to sleep.

___________________________________________ 

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.