Each day this week, the Book Review will present a new essay and game, along with a series of celebrity readings, designed to help you memorize a delightful poem: “Recuerdo,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Today’s letter comes from Gregory Cowles, the poetry editor at the Book Review. Dear readers, Welcome to Day 4 of the Poetry Challenge. Are you very tired? Are you very merry? So far you’ve met your poem and its author, considered it in its very specific New York context, even translated some of its lines into emoji. With any luck, you have memorized at least a chunk of it along the way. But now the end is drawing near; dawn is coming. That subject — night’s passing, and the bittersweet arrival of the sunrise — is the theme of today’s installment. “Recuerdo” belongs to a long tradition of poems that greet the day — so long, in fact, that the form has a name all its own: “aubade,” from the French for dawn. (Perhaps you did not realize at the start of the week that it would involve a Spanish poem title and a French poetry genre. Be glad we spared you from T.S. Eliot and his Greek.) Edna St. Vincent Millay was intimately familiar with this style of poem, and consciously put “Recuerdo” into conversation with some of its predecessors. You will see some of them today, along with other examples, and have a chance to put your memory of the final stanza to the test. Good luck, and good morrow. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Love this email? Forward to a friend. Want this email? Sign-up here. Have a suggestion for this email? Then send us a note at books@nytimes.com.
|
