Claudia Gary

The Dance of a Breeze:

Auditory Imagery in Rhina P. Espaillat’s Sonnet “As If Some Jaded Reader”

Claudia Gary presented an earlier version of this essay at the 2024 conference of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.

In her sonnets and other poems, Rhina P. Espaillat often combines visual imagery with sound so dynamically that she recreates in the reader the motion she describes on the page. Espaillat, originally from the Dominican Republic, has spent her entire adult life in the USA as a teacher and poet, writing in both English and Spanish as well as translating between the two. As a translator, besides bringing such masters as Richard Wilbur and Robert Frost into Spanish, she has introduced a number of treasured Spanish poets to English-speaking readers. But in the present poem, “As If Some Jaded Reader,” Espaillat’s use of the word “translate” vividly demonstrates her understanding that translation involves more than language.

      As If Some Jaded Reader*                     

          by Rhina P. Espaillat

          As if some jaded reader browsed the air,

          riffled the pages of our summer trees,

          and finding nothing worth perusing there

          tossed every folio aside, the breeze

          dismisses lightly what the light translates

          from soil and water into each green tongue

          the maple speaks. Its passing agitates

          the leaves, but leaves them in their softly sung

          monotony, impatient with the way

          they, too, repeat themselves, like earthly hours.

          This wind turns and returns, worries the day,

          exhorting it to harness greater powers,

          contrive a darker plot, matter less thin,

          confront some story eager to begin.

Espaillat begins: “As if some jaded reader browsed the air….” Harnessing the tension inherent in a compact form such as the sonnet (which she has described elsewhere as an opportunity to “dance in a box”), she describes a breeze that “riffled the pages of our summer trees.” This personified breeze at first found “nothing worth perusing there [and] tossed every folio aside….” But the trees, defying the wind’s bored agitation, remain monotonous. This remark, which appears at the sonnet’s volta, seemingly taunts the wind to intensify.

Throughout the poem, Espaillat goes beyond narrative, using auditory and visual qualities in tandem to create a wild dance of the senses and intellect. In her orchestration, the imagery interacts with the sound of the poem itself — a clear iambic pentameter but with metrical variations that track the wind’s drive through the scene, portraying it as a specific rhythmic pattern. This pattern of trochee-iamb first appears at the beginning of line 2 (“riffled the pag[es]”), then twice in succession on line 11 (“turns and returns, worries the day”), and finally at the end of line 13 (“matter less thin”). True to personification as a reader, the wind—in sonic form—follows the path a reader would take through this poem, making a graceful entrance on the upper left side, later assuming center stage, and finally departing on the lower right.

Between the wind’s first auditory appearance on line 2 and its main performance on line 11, we experience instances in which Espaillat’s images refuse to stand still. Her playful use of repetition and homonyms—including between adverbs and nouns, and between nouns and verbs —guarantees that even the slightest motion becomes a transformation: “the breeze / dismisses lightly what the light translates” and soon afterward “Its passing agitates / the leaves, but leaves them in their softly sung / monotony…” Throughout the poem there is a continuous rippling motion, thanks to the ongoing interplay between sound and image.

At the end, after “This wind turns and returns, worries the day,” it seeks to “contrive a darker plot, matter less thin, / confront some story eager to begin.” By the time we reach this final couplet, the reader has experienced these sights, sounds, and concepts in such a way as to question whether such everyday occurrences in nature can possibly be ordinary. And in Rhina Espaillat’s eyes, ears, and voice, nothing is ever ordinary.

*NVR thanks Rhina Espaillat for the permission to republish her sonnet “As If Some Jaded Reader.” It originally appeared in the Winter 2006 issue of The Dark Horse.

Claudia Gary teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Natural Meter, Persona Poems, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and privately, currently via Zoom. Author of Humor Me (2006) and several chapbooks, most recently Genetic Revisionism, she is also a science writer, visual artist, and composer of tonal art songs and chamber music (see

https://straightlabyrinth.info/conference.html). Her poetry chapbooks are available via the email address at pw.org/content/claudia_gary.