Complete Works of Sara Teasdale Read online

And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley

  Will never seem fresh or clear

  For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water

  In the feathery green of the year.

  AT TINTAGIL

  Iseult, Iseult, by the long waterways

  Watching the wintry moon, white as a flower,

  I have remembered how once in Tintagil

  You heard the tread of Time hour after hour.

  By casements hung with night, while all your women slept

  You turned toward Brittany, awake, alone,

  In the high chamber hushed, save where the candle dripped

  With the slow patient sound of blood on stone.

  The ache of empty arms was an old tale to you,

  And all the tragic tunes that love can play,

  Yet with no woman born would you have changed your lot,

  Though there were greater queens who had been gay.

  THERE WILL BE STARS

  There will be stars over the place forever;

  Though the house we loved and the street we loved are lost,

  Every time the earth circles her orbit

  On the night the autumn equinox is crossed,

  Two stars we knew, poised on the peak of midnight

  Will reach their zenith; stillness will be deep;

  There will be stars over the place forever,

  There will be stars forever, while we sleep.

  II: PICTURES OF AUTUMN

  AUTUMN

  (Parc Monceau)

  I shall remember only these leaves falling

  Small and incessant in the still air,

  Yellow leaves on the dark green water resting

  And the marble Venus there —

  Is she pointing to her breasts or trying to hide them?

  There is no god to care.

  The colonnade curves close to the leaf-strewn water

  And its reflection seems

  Lost in the mass of leaves and unavailing

  As a dream lost among dreams;

  The colonnade curves close to the leaf-strewn water

  A dream lost among dreams.

  SEPTEMBER DAY

  (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.

  FONTAINE BLEAU

  Interminable palaces front on the green parterres,

  And ghosts of ladies lovely and immoral

  Glide down the gilded stairs,

  The high cold corridors are clicking with the heel taps

  That long ago were theirs.

  But in the sunshine, in the vague autumn sunshine,

  The geometric gardens are desolately gay;

  The crimson and scarlet and rose-red dahlias

  Are painted like the ladies who used to pass this way

  With a ringletted monarch, a Henry or a Louis

  On a lost October day.

  The aisles of the garden lead into the forest,

  The aisles lead into autumn, a damp wind grieves,

  Ghostly kings are hunting, the boar breaks cover,

  But the sounds of horse and horn are hushed in falling leaves,

  Four centuries of autumns, four centuries of leaves.

  LATE OCTOBER

  (Bois de Boulogne)

  Listen, the damp leaves on the walks are blowing

  With a ghost of sound;

  Is it a fog or is it a rain dripping

  From the low trees to the ground?

  If I had gone before, I could have remembered

  Lilacs and green afternoons of May;

  I chose to wait, I chose to hear from autumn

  Whatever she has to say.

  III: SAND DRIFT

  BEAUTIFUL, PROUD SEA

  Careless forever, beautiful proud sea,

  You laugh in happy thunder all alone,

  You fold upon yourself, you dance your dance

  Impartially on drift-weed, sand or stone.

  You make us believe that we can outlive death,

  You make us for an instant, for your sake,

  Burn, like stretched silver of a wave,

  Not breaking, but about to break.

  LAND’S END

  The shores of the world are ours, the solitary

  Beaches that bear no fruit, nor any flowers,

  Only the harsh sea-grass that the wind harries

  Hours on unbroken hours.

  No one will envy us these empty reaches

  At the world’s end, and none will care that we

  Leave our lost footprints where the sand forever

  Takes the unchanging passion of the sea.

  SAND DRIFT

  I thought I should not walk these dunes again,

  Nor feel the sting of this wind-bitten sand,

  Where the coarse grasses always blow one way,

  Bent, as my thoughts are, by an unseen hand.

  I have returned; where the last wave rushed up

  The wet sand is a mirror for the sky

  A bright blue instant, and along its sheen

  The nimble sandpipers run twinkling by.

  Nothing has changed; with the same hollow thunder

  The waves die in their everlasting snow —

  Only the place we sat is drifted over,

  Lost in the blowing sand, long, long ago.

  BLUE STARGRASS

  If we took the old path

  In the old field

  The same gate would stand there

  That will never yield.

  Where the sun warmed us

  With a cloak made of gold,

  The rain would be falling

  And the wind would be cold;

  And we would stop to search

  In the wind and the rain,

  But we would not find the stargrass

  By the path again.

  LOW TIDE

  The birds are gathering over the dunes,

  Swerving and wheeling in shifting flight,

  A thousand wings sweep darkly by

  Over the dunes and out of sight.

  Why did you bring me down to the sea

  With the gathering birds and the fish-hawk flying.

  The tide is low and the wind is hard,

  Nothing is left but the old year dying.

  I wish I were one of the gathering birds,

  Two sharp black wings would be good for me —

  When nothing is left but the old year dying,

  Why did you bring me down to the sea?

  IV: PORTRAITS

  EFFIGY OF A NUN

  (Sixteenth Century)

  Infinite gentleness, infinite irony

  Are in this face with fast-sealed eyes,

  And around this mouth that learned in loneliness

  How useless their wisdom is to the wise.

  In her nun’s habit carved, patiently, lovingly,

  By one who knew the ways of womankind,

  This woman’s face still keeps, in its cold wistful calm,

  All of the subtle pride of her mind.

  These long patrician hands, clasping the crucifix,

  Show she had weighed the world, her will was set;

  These pale curved lips of hers, holding their hidden smile,

  Once having made their choice, knew no regret.

  She was of those who hoard their own thoughts carefully,

  Feeling them far too dear to give away,

  Content to look at life with the high, insolent

  Air of an audience watching a play.

 
If she was curious, if she was passionate

  She must have told herself that love was great,

  But that the lacking it might be as great a thing

  If she held fast to it, challenging fate.

  She who so loved herself and her own warring thoughts,

  Watching their humorous, tragic rebound,

  In her thick habit’s fold, sleeping, sleeping,

  Is she amused at dreams she has found?

  Infinite tenderness, infinite irony

  Are hidden forever in her closed eyes,

  Who must have learned too well in her long loneliness

  How empty wisdom is, even to the wise.

  THOSE WHO LOVE

  Those who love the most,

  Do not talk of their love,

  Francesca, Guinevere,

  Deirdre, Iseult, Heloise,

  In the fragrant gardens of heaven

  Are silent, or speak if at all

  Of fragile, inconsequent things.

  And a woman I used to know

  Who loved one man from her youth,

  Against the strength of the fates

  Fighting in somber pride,

  Never spoke of this thing,

  But hearing his name by chance,

  A light would pass over her face.

  EPITAPH

  Serene descent, as a red leaf’s descending

  When there is neither wind nor noise of rain,

  But only autumn air and the unending

  Drawing of all things to the earth again:

  So be it; let the snow sift deep and cover

  All that was drunken once with light and air;

  The earth will not regret her tireless lover,

  Nor he awake to know she does not care.

  APPRAISAL

  Never think she loves him wholly,

  Never believe her love is blind,

  All his faults are locked securely

  In a closet of her mind;

  All his indecisions folded

  Like old flags that time has faded,

  Limp and streaked with rain,

  And his cautiousness like garments

  Frayed and thin, with many a stain —

  Let them be, oh let them be,

  There is treasure to outweigh them,

  His proud will that sharply stirred,

  Climbs as surely as the tide,

  Senses strained too taut to sleep,

  Gentleness to beast and bird,

  Humor flickering hushed and wide

  As the moon on moving water,

  And a tenderness too deep

  To be gathered in a word.

  THE WISE WOMAN

  She must be rich who can forego

  An hour so jewelled with delight,

  She must have treasuries of joy

  That she can draw on day and night,

  She must be very sure of heaven —

  Or is it only that she feels

  How much more safe it is to lack

  A thing that time so often steals.

  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.

  V: MIDSUMMER NIGHTS

  TWILIGHT

  (Nahant)

  There was an evening when the sky was clear,

  Ineffably translucent in its blue;

  The tide was falling and the sea withdrew

  In hushed and happy music from the sheer

  Shadowy granite of the cliffs; and fear

  Of what life may be, and what death can do,

  Fell from us like steel armor, and we knew

  The wisdom of the Law that holds us here.

  It was as though we saw the Secret Will,

  It was as though we floated and were free;

  In the south-west a planet shone serenely,

  And the high moon, most reticent and queenly,

  Seeing the earth had darkened and grown still,

  Misted with light the meadows of the sea.

  FULL MOON

  (Santa Barbara)

  I listened, there was not a sound to hear

  In the great rain of moonlight pouring down,

  The eucalyptus trees were carved in silver,

  And a light mist of silver lulled the town.

  I saw far off the grey Pacific bearing

  A broad white disk of flame,

  And on the garden-walk a snail beside me

  Tracing in crystal the slow way he came.

  THE FOUNTAIN

  Fountain, fountain, what do you say

  Singing at night alone?

  “It is enough to rise and fall

  Here in my basin of stone.”

  But are you content as you seem to be

  So near the freedom and rush of the sea?

  “I have listened all night to its laboring sound,

  It heaves and sags, as the moon runs round;

  Ocean and fountain, shadow and tree,

  Nothing escapes, nothing is free.”

  CLEAR EVENING

  The crescent moon is large enough to linger

  A little while after the twilight goes,

  This moist midsummer night the garden perfumes

  Are earth and apple, dewy pine and rose.

  Over my head four new-cut stars are glinting

  And the inevitable night draws on;

  I am alone, the old terror takes me,

  Evenings will come like this when I am gone;

  Evenings on evenings, years on years forever —

  Be taut, my spirit, close upon and keep

  The scent, the brooding chill, the gliding fire-fly,

  A poem learned before I fall asleep.

  NOT BY THE SEA

  Not by the sea, but somewhere in the hills,

  Not by the sea, but in the uplands surely

  There must be rest where a dim pool demurely

  Watches all night the stern slow-moving skies;

  Not by the sea, that never was appeased,

  Not by the sea, whose immemorial longing

  Shames the tired earth where even longing dies,

  Not by the sea that bore Iseult and Helen,

  But in a dark green hollow of the hills

  There must be sleep, even for sleepless eyes.

  MIDSUMMER NIGHT

  Midsummer night without a moon, but the stars

  In a serene bright multitude were there,

  Even the shyest ones, even the faint motes shining

  Low in the north, under the Little Bear.

  When I have said, “This tragic farce I play in

  Has neither dignity, delight nor end,”

  The holy night draws all its stars around me,

  I am ashamed, I have betrayed my Friend.

  VI: THE CRYSTAL GAZER

  THE CRYSTAL GAZER

  I shall gather myself into myself again,

  I shall take my scattered selves and make them one,

  Fusing them into a polished crystal ball

  Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun.

  I shall sit like a sibyl, hour after hour intent,

  Watching the future come and the present go,

  And the little shifting pictures of people rushing

  In restless self-importance to and fro.

  THE SOLITARY

  My heart has grown rich with the passing of years,

  I have less need now than when I was young

  To share myself with every corner

  Or shape my thoughts into words with my tongue.

  It is one to me that they come or go

  If I have myself and the drive of my will,

  And strength to climb on a summer night

  And watch the stars swarm over th
e hill.

  Let them think I love them more than I do,

  Let them think I care, though I go alone;

  If it lifts their pride, what is it to me

  Who am self-complete as a flower or a stone.

  DAY’S ENDING

  (Tucson)

  Aloof as aged kings,

  Wearing like them the purple,

  The mountains ring the mesa

  Crowned with a dusky light;

  Many a time I watched

  That coming-on of darkness

  Till stars burned through the heavens

  Intolerably bright.

  It was not long I lived there

  But I became a woman

  Under those vehement stars,

  For it was there I heard

  For the first time my spirit

  Forging an iron rule for me,

  As though with slow cold hammers

  Beating out word by word:

  “Only yourself can heal you,

  Only yourself can lead you,

  The road is heavy going

  And ends where no man knows;

  Take love when love is given,

  But never think to find it

  A sure escape from sorrow

  Or a complete repose.”

  A REPLY

  Four people knew the very me,

  Four is enough, so let it be;

  For the rest I make no chart,

  There are no highroads to my heart;

  The gates are locked, they will not stir

  For any ardent traveller.

  I have not been misunderstood,

  And on the whole, I think life good —

  So waste no sympathy on me

  Or any well-meant gallantry;

  I have enough to do to muse

  On memories I would not lose.

  LEISURE

  If I should make no poems any more

  There would be rest at least, so let it be;