Like Boris Dralyuk (whose “Absentee Ballet” ran as the Sun’s Poem of the Day on January 11), the contemporary poet Caitlin Doyle belongs to a younger generation of poets whose work evinces, without self-consciousness or strained effort, a deep sense of traditional poetic form. Ms. Doyle, a native of Long Island, New York, stands out in an impressive field as a poet for whom the structures of rhyme and meter are so embedded in the ear and imagination that her formal play feels as reflexive as laughter. In a poem like “Carnival,” for example, the simple patterns of children’s verse turn into something which, like the funhouse mirrors the poem describes, offers an experience which is simultaneously exhilarating and obscurely scary. 

Today’s Poem of the Day, which won the 2017 Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry, also draws on the simplicity of nursery rhymes, as well as their imagery, for its punch. The poem alternates unrhymed mostly-trimeter couplets with single parenthetical, tetrameter lines which, though they change, function as a rhymed refrain or antiphon. The poem’s call and response motion echoes both the ticking of a clock and the movement of a mind arguing with itself. At the mind’s forefront, a conscious voice rehashes and rationalizes the dissolution of a love affair. The second interior voice, meanwhile, resonant as a heartbeat, knows better and tells a bitter truth. 

Wish 
by Caitlin Doyle 
 
I told him I needed time —  
he gave me a cuckoo clock  
 
(I couldn’t work the winding key) 
 
I told him I needed space — 
he gave me a telescope  
 
(or make the moon look back at me)  
 
I told him I needed change — 
he gave me a penny jar  
 
(or stop from spending every cent)  
 
I told him I needed more — 
he led me to the well  
 
(or count up every wish I’d spent)  
 
Now I have so much time,  
the cuckoo’s flown away  
 
(the moon’s a clock that’s come unwound)  
 
Now I have so much space,  
it’s night for days on end  
 
(the moon’s a shadow on the ground)  
 
Now I have so much change,  
the well’s just one more wish  
 
(the moon’s a coin the well has drowned) 

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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 are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.