Sara Teasdale
Sara Teasdale
Poems.
Time Line.
Books.
Alphabetic index:
Contains poems from:
- Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems (1907).
- Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911).
- Rivers To The Sea (1915).
- Love Songs (1917).
- Flame and Shadow (1920).
- Dark of the Moon (1926).
- Stars To-night: Verses for Boys and Girls (1930).
- Strange Victory (1933).
Dark of the Moon (1926).
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Sixth of her books. Possibly her strongest. Includes:
Autumn
(Pont de Neuilly)
The Seine flows out of the mist
And into the mist again;
The trees lean over the water,
The small leaves fall like rain.
The leaves fall patiently,
Nothing remembers or grieves;
The river takes to the sea
The yellow drift of the leaves.
Milky and cold is the air,
The leaves float with the stream,
The river comes out of a sleep
And goes away in a dream.
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and:
"She who could bind you"
She who could bind you
Could bind fire to a wall;
She who could hold you
Could hold a waterfall.
She who could keep you
Could keep the wind from blowing
On a warm spring night
With a low moon glowing.
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Flame and Shadow (1920).
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Her fifth collection. At 48 pages, one of the longer in The Collected Poems.
While this group is still full of love poems such as:
Driftwood
My forefathers gave me
My spirit's shaken flame,
The shape of hands, the beat of heart,
The letters of my name.
But it was my lovers,
And not my sleeping sires,
Who gave the flame its changeful
And iridescent fires;
As the driftwood burning
Learned its jeweled blaze
From the sea's blue splendor
Or colored nights and days.
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It also contains poems about the acceptance of death, including this
amazing poem (ignoring some needed cuts in the first four lines)
written during World War One:
"There will come soft rains"
(War Time)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she work at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
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Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911).
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Her second (and therefore another early) collection.
Her fourth collection.
Of this book's four sections, the first fills half of the book.
Its poems are mostly short (8-to-16-line) yet significant poems of yearning for a lost
or secret or impossible love. Notice the volta-like turn in many of her poems,
such as this one where she lays out her three examples and then her response:
Jewels
If I should see your eyes again,
I know how far their look would go —
Back to a morning in the park
With sapphire shadows on the snow.
Or back to oak trees in the spring
When you unloosed my hair and kissed
The head that lay against your knees
In the leaf shadow's amethyst.
And still another shining place
We would remember -- how the dun
Wild mountain held us on its crest
One diamond morning white with sun.
But I will turn my eyes from you
As women turn to put away
The jewels they have worn at night
And cannot wear in sober day.
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Her rhymes pull the reader forward
in the curiosity and delight of 'what next'. Sometimes the rhymes astonish (such as
kissed/amethyst), though sometimes the form still drives the words (such as her use above of 'dun'
in line 10).
In the second section she shows her spiritual struggles and her
romantic feelings about her own death,
such as "In a Burying Ground", whose middle stanza is:
Jewels
"O Soul," I said, "have you no tears?
Was not the body dear to you?"
I heard my soul say carelessly,
"The myrtle flowers will grow more blue."
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Many of the poems are in 2 or more sections with the same number of lines in
each stanza. Specifically:
| Lines per stanza
| Number of poems
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| 4
| 54 [31 have 2 stanzas; 13 have 3 stanzas;
the others have 1, 4, or 5 stanza.]
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| 6
| 4
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| 8
| 3
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The poems are usually small. Only one is more than a page.
Specifically:
| Lines per poem
| Number of poems
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| 4
| 1
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| 6
| 1
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| 8
| 33
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| 10
| 2
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| 11
| 1
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| 12
| 15
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| 13
| 1
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| 14
| 3
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| 10
| 2
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| 16
| 9
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| 18
| 1
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| 20
| 4
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| 24
| 1
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| Over 2 pages
| 1
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Her third collection of youthful poems:
- Formal poems with short lines (often 3 or 4 iambs).
- Poems with a little padding, especially through extra adjectives, inserted to satisfy the form rather than the needs
of the poem.
- Mostly romantic poems of love and longing, such as:
Gifts
I gave my first love laughter,
I gave my second tears,
I gave my third love silence
Through all the years.
My first love gave me singing,
My second eyes to see,
But oh, it was my third love
Who gave my soul to me.
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- Includes poems on acceptance of death and what might happen
after death:
After Death
Now while my lips are living
Their words must stay unsaid,
And will my soul remember
To speak when I am dead?
Yet if my soul remembered
You would not heed it, dear,
For now you must not listen,
And then you could not hear.
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- Concludes with the blank-verse long (7 pages in 3 sections) poem "Sappho"
which includes these lines that might be as much about Teasdale as
Sappho:
How should they know that Sappho lived and died
Faithful to love, not faithful to the lover
...
And every time that love has made me weep,
I have rejoiced that love could be so strong;
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Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems (1907).
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Her first published book.
While these are early poems, they are enthusiastic and often insightful.
Besides the many sonnets, Teasdale includes poems of 3-stanza quatrains and of a single 6-line stanza.
Most of the lines are end-stopped.
One of my favorites (included in
Love Songs
as well as
The Collected Poems) is:
Faults
They came to tell your faults to me,
They named them over one by one;
I laughed aloud when they were done,
I knew them all so well before, —
Oh, they were blind, too blind to see
Your faults had made me love you more.
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The
form of her sonnets
is the 14-line
Italian (or Petrarchan) Sonnet,
which starts with 8 lines that use two rhymes
in the 'abbaabba' pattern of rima baciata ("kissing rhyme"),
a more romantic term than the English "envelope" rhyme.
In the traditional form, the eight opening lines are a unit and then there is an emotional
or logical volta (jump or shift),
with the conclusion of the poem in a sestet in " chained rhyme" , which can use a variety of sequences.
Teasdale includes:
c d c d c d
c d d c c d
c d d c e e
c d d e c e
c d e c d e
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Stars To-night: Verses for Boys and Girls (1930).
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Seventh of her books.
Teasdale apparently though that these poems are about nature,
rather than about love or death (at least on the surface),
would be of more interest to children rather than adults.
But she is still mind stretching as in "I stood upon a star":
I stretched my mind until I stood
Out in space, upon a star;
I looked, and saw the flying earth
Where seven planets are.
...
I saw the dark side of the moon
No man has ever seen.
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Strange Victory (1933).
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Eighth of her books, and her second strongest
(second only to
Dark of the Moon), published posthumously.
An increasing acceptance of death, as for example:
Moon's Ending
Moon, worn thin to the width of a quill,
In the dawn clouds flying,
How good to go, light into light, and still
Giving light, dying.
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and:
"All that was mortal"
All that was mortal shall be burned away,
All that was mind shall have been put to sleep.
Only the spirit shall awake to say
What the deep says to the deep;
But for an instance, for it too is fleeting—
As on a field with new snow everywhere,
Footprints of birds record a brief alighting
In flight begun and ended in the air.
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- 1884.
- Born Sarah Trevor Teasdale on August 8, 1884, in St. Louis, Missouri.
Youngest child in a Baptist family.
[She had a sister, Mary (17), and two brothers, George (20) and John Warren Jr. (14).)
- 1898.
- Attended the prestigious all-girl Mary Institute in St. Louis.
- 1899.
- Began study in Hosmer Hall.
- 1903.
- Graduated from Hosmer Hall.
- 1904-1907.
- With friends published a monthly literary magazine, The Potter's Wheel.
- 1905.
- First of several trips to Europe.
- Continued to live at home when she was not traveling.
- 1907.
- First poem "Guenevere" printed in Reedy's Mirror.
- Published first book,
Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems.
- 1911.
- Published second book,
Helen of Troy and Other Poems.
- 1913.
- Courted by poet Vachel Lindsay (born 1879 in Springfield, Illinois) and by businessman Ernst Filsinger.
- Began to consider suicide.
- 1914.
- Married Ernst Filsinger.
- 1915.
- Moved to New York City with her husband Ernst Filsinger.
- Published
Rivers To The Sea.
- 1917.
- Published
Love Songs.
- Edited
The Answering Voice; A Hundred Love Lyrics by Women.
- 1918.
- For
Love Songs, won
- 1920.
- Published
Flame and Shadow.
- 1926.
- Published
Dark of the Moon.
- 1929.
- Divorced Ernst Filsinger.
- 1930.
- Published
Stars To-night: Verses for Boys and Girls.
- 1931.
- Death (December 5) of her long-time friend, the poet Vachel Lindsay, by suicide.
- 1932.
- Made final trip (in summer) to England.
- 1933.
- Died January 29, 1933, by suicide.
-
Strange Victory
published posthumously.
- 1937.
-
The Collected Poems
published posthumously.
- 1994.
- Inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
- 2008.
- One of 48 women poets in
100 essential modern poems by women:
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Links and Books.
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[Thanks for visiting.]
