Complete Works of Sara Teasdale Read online

Like fireflies on a moist June night,

  The planetoids among the planets

  Played for their own delight.

  I watched earth putting off her winter

  And slipping into green;

  I saw the dark side of the moon

  No man has ever seen.

  Like shining wheels in an opened watch

  They all revolved with soundless motion;

  Earth sparkled like a rain-wet flower,

  Bearing her petals, plain and ocean.

  WINTER NOON

  Snow-dust driven over the snow

  In glittering light,

  Low hills, far as the eye can go,

  White on white;

  Blue as a blue jay, shadows run

  Due north from every tree —

  Chipmunk, do you like the sun,

  The blowing snow and me?

  Strange Victory, 1933

  CONTENTS

  MOON’S ENDING

  WISDOM

  AUTUMN ON THE BEACHES

  ADVICE TO A GIRL

  EVEN TO-DAY

  TRUCE

  STRANGE VICTORY

  SECRET TREASURE

  LAST PRELUDE

  IN A DARKENING GARDEN

  TO M.

  ASHES

  IN MEMORY OF VACHEL LINDSAY

  GRACE BEFORE SLEEP

  ALL THAT WAS MORTAL

  TO THE SEA

  RETURN TO A COUNTRY HOUSE

  SINCE DEATH BRUSHED PAST ME

  TO A CHILD WATCHING THE GULLS

  LINES

  THERE WILL BE REST

  The first edition’s title page

  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.

  WISDOM

  Oh to relinquish, with no more of sound

  Than the bent bough’s when the bright apples fall;

  Oh to let go, without a cry or call

  That can be heard by any above ground;

  Let the dead know, but not the living see —

  The dead who loved me will not suffer, knowing

  It is all one, the coming or the going,

  If I have kept the last, essential me.

  If that is safe, then I am safe indeed,

  It is my citadel, my church, my home,

  My mother and my child, my constant friend;

  It is my music, making for my need

  A paean like the cymbals of the foam,

  Or silence, level, spacious, without end.

  AUTUMN ON THE BEACHES

  Not more blue at the dawn of the world,

  Not more virgin or more gay,

  Never in all the million years

  Was the sea happier than to-day.

  The sand was not more trackless then,

  Morning more stainless or more cold —

  Only the forest and the fields

  Know that the year is old.

  ADVICE TO A GIRL

  No one worth possessing

  Can be quite possessed;

  Lay that on your heart,

  My young angry dear;

  This truth, this hard and precious stone,

  Lay it on your hot cheek,

  Let it hide your tear.

  Hold it like a crystal

  When you are alone

  And gaze in the depths of the icy stone.

  Long, look long and you will be blessed:

  No one worth possessing

  Can be quite possessed.

  AGE

  Brooks sing in the spring

  And in summer cease;

  I who sang in my youth

  Now hold my peace;

  Youth is a noisy stream

  Chattering over the ground,

  But the sad wisdom of age

  Wells up without sound.

  EVEN TO-DAY

  What if the bridge men built goes down,

  What if the torrent sweeps the town,

  The hills are safe, the hills remain,

  And hills are happy in the rain;

  If I can climb the hills and find

  A small square cottage to my mind,

  A lonely but a cleanly house

  With shelves too bare to tempt a mouse,

  Whatever years remain to me

  I shall live out in dignity.

  TRUCE

  Take heart, for now the battle is half over,

  We have not shamed our sires;

  Pride, the lone pennon, ravelled by the storm-wind

  Stands in the sunset fires.

  It may be, with the coming-on of evening

  We shall be granted unassailed repose,

  And what is left of dusk will be less darkness

  Than luminous air, on which the crescent glows.

  STRANGE VICTORY

  To this, to this, after my hope was lost,

  To this strange victory;

  To find you with the living, not the dead,

  To find you glad of me;

  To find you wounded even less than I,

  Moving as I across the stricken plain;

  After the battle to have found your voice

  Lifted above the slain.

  SECRET TREASURE

  Fear not that my music seems

  Like water locked in winter streams;

  You are the sun that many a time

  Thawed those rivers into rhyme,

  But let them for a while remain

  A hidden music in my brain.

  Unmeaning phrase and wordless measure,

  That unencumbered loveliness

  Which is a poet’s secret treasure

  Sings in me now, and sings no less

  That even for your lenient eyes

  It will not live in written guise.

  LAST PRELUDE

  If this shall be the last time

  The melody flies upward

  With its rush of sparks in flight,

  Let me go up with it in fire and laughter,

  Or let me drown if need be

  Lost in the swirl of light.

  The violins are tuning, whimpering, catching thunder

  From the suppressed dark agony of viols —

  Once more let heaven clutch me, plunge me under

  Miles on uncounted miles.

  IN A DARKENING GARDEN

  Gather together, against the coming of night,

  All that we played with here,

  Toys and fruits, the quill from the sea-bird’s flight,

  The small flute, hollow and clear;

  The apple that was not eaten, the grapes untasted

  Let them be put away.

  They served for us, I would not have them wasted,

  They lasted out our day.

  TO M.

  Till the last sleep, from the blind waking at birth,

  Bearing the weight of the years between the two,

  I shall find no better thing upon the earth

  Than the wilful, noble, faulty thing which is you.

  You have not failed me; but if you too should fail me,

  Being human, bound on your own inviolate quest,

  No matter now what the years do to assail me

  I shall go, in some sort, a victor, down to my rest.

  ASHES

  Laid in a quiet corner of the world

  There will be left no more of me some night

  Than the lone bat could carry in his flight

  Over the meadows when the moon is furled;

  I shall be then so little, and so lost,

  Only the many-fingered rain will find me,

  And I have taken thought to leave behind me

  Nothing to feel the long on-coming frost.

  Now without sorrow and without elation

  I can lay down my body, nor deplore

  How little, with her insufficient ration,

  Life has to feed us —
but these hands, must they

  Go in the same blank, ignominious way,

  And fold upon themselves, at last, no more?

  IN MEMORY OF VACHEL LINDSAY

  “Deep in the ages,” you said, “deep in the ages,”

  And, “To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name.”

  You are deep in the ages, now, deep in the ages,

  You whom the world could not break, nor the years tame.

  Fly out, fly on, eagle that is not forgotten,

  Fly straight to the innermost light, you who loved sun in your eyes,

  Free of the fret, free of the weight of living,

  Bravest among the brave, gayest among the wise.

  GRACE BEFORE SLEEP

  How can our minds and bodies be

  Grateful enough that we have spent

  Here in this generous room, we three,

  This evening of content?

  Each one of us has walked through storm

  And fled the wolves along the road;

  But here the hearth is wide and warm,

  And for this shelter and this light

  Accept, O Lord, our thanks to-night.

  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 instant, 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.

  TO THE SEA

  Bitter and beautiful, sing no more;

  Scarf of spindrift strewn on the shore,

  Burn no more in the noon-day light,

  Let there be night for me, let there be night.

  On the restless beaches I used to range

  The two that I loved have walked with me —

  I saw them change and my own heart change —

  I cannot face the unchanging sea.

  RETURN TO A COUNTRY HOUSE

  Nothing but darkness enters in this room,

  Nothing but darkness and the winter night,

  Yet on this bed once years ago a light

  Silvered the sheets with an unearthly bloom;

  It was the planet Venus in the west

  Casting a square of brightness on this bed,

  And in that light your dark and lovely head

  Lay for a while and seemed to be at rest.

  But that the light is gone, and that no more

  Even if it were here, would you be here, —

  That is one line in a long tragic play

  That has been acted many times before,

  And acted best when not a single tear

  Falls, — when the mind and not the heart holds sway.

  SINCE DEATH BRUSHED PAST ME

  Since Death brushed past me once more to-day,

  Let me say quickly what I must say:

  Take without shame the love I give you,

  Take it before I am hurried away.

  You are intrepid, noble, kind,

  My heart goes to you with my mind,

  The plummet of your thought is long

  Sunk in deep water, cold with song.

  You are all I asked, my dear —

  My words are said, my way is clear.

  TO A CHILD WATCHING THE GULLS

  (Queenstown Harbor)

  The painted light was on their underwings,

  And on their firm curved breasts the painted light,

  Sailing they swerved in the red air of sunset

  With petulant cries unworthy of their flight;

  But on their underwings that fleeting splendor,

  Those chilly breasts an instant burning red —

  You who are young, O you who will outlive me,

  Remember them for the indifferent dead.

  LINES

  These are the ultimate highlands,

  Like chord on chord of music

  Climbing to rest

  On the highest peak and the bluest

  Large on the luminous heavens

  Deep in the west.

  THERE WILL BE REST

  There will be rest, and sure stars shining

  Over the roof-tops crowned with snow,

  A reign of rest, serene forgetting,

  The music of stillness holy and low.

  I will make this world of my devising

  Out of a dream in my lonely mind,

  I shall find the crystal of peace, — above me

  Stars I shall find.

  The Poems

  38 Kingsbury Place, St. Louis, Missouri – the poet’s home in her adolescent years. The house was designed by Teasdale’s mother, with a private suite for Sara on the second floor. Guests entered through a separate entrance and were admitted by appointment. This suite is where Sara worked, slept, and often dined alone.

  List of Poems in Chronological Order

  Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems, 1907

  To Duse

  To Eleonora Duse

  To Eleonora Duse

  To a Picture of Eleonora Duse in “The Dead City

  To a Picture of Eleonora Duse in “The Dead City

  To a Picture of Eleonora Duse as “Francesca da Rimini”

  To a Picture of Eleonora Duse

  To a Picture of Eleonora Duse with the Greek Fire in “Francesca da Rimini”

  A Song to Eleonora Duse in “Francesca da Rimini”

  To Japanese Incense

  To Sappho, I

  To Sappho, II

  To L.R.E

  The Meeting

  The Gift

  Dead Love

  The Love that Goes A-begging

  Song

  Wishes

  Dusk in Autumn

  In David’s “Child’s Garden of Verses”

  Triolets

  Sonnet

  Dream Song

  To Joy

  Roses and Rue

  The Heart’s House

  The House of Dreams

  Faults

  Helen of Troy and Other Poems, 1911

  Helen of Troy

  Beatrice

  Sappho

  Marianna Alcoforando

  Guenevere

  Erinna

  Song

  The Rose and the Bee

  The Song Maker

  Wild Asters

  When Love Goes

  The Wayfarer

  The Princess in the Tower

  When Love Was Born

  The Shrine

  The Blind

  Love Me

  The Song for Colin

  Four Winds

  Roundel

  Dew

  A Maiden

  I Love You

  But Not to Me

  Hidden Love

  Snow Song

  Youth and the Pilgrim

  The Wanderer

  I Would Live in Your Love

  May

  Rispetto

  Less than the Cloud to the Wind

  Buried Love

  Song

  Pierrot

  At Night

  Song

  Love in Autumn

  The Kiss

  November

  A Song of the Princess

  The Wind

  A Winter Night

  The Metropolitan Tower

  Gramercy Park

  In the Metropolitan Museum

  Coney Island

  Union Square

  Central Park at Dusk

  Young Love

  Sonnets and Lyrics

  Soul’s Birth

  Love and Death

  For the Anniversary of John Keats’ Death

  Silence

  The Return

  Fear

  Anadyomene

  Galahad in the Castle of the Maidens

  To an Aeolian Harp

  To Erinna />
  To Cleis

  Paris in Spring

  Madeira from the Sea

  City Vignettes

  By the Sea

  On the Death of Swinburne

  Triolets

  Vox Corporis

  A Ballad of Two Knights

  Christmas Carol

  The Faery Forest

  A Fantasy

  A Minuet of Mozart’s

  Twilight

  The Prayer

  Two Songs for a Child

  Rivers to the Sea, 1915

  SPRING NIGHT

  THE FLIGHT

  BUT WHAT IF I HEARD MY FIRST LOVE CALLING ME ONCE MORE?

  NEW LOVE AND OLD

  THE LOOK

  SPRING

  THE LIGHTED WINDOW

  THE KISS

  SWANS

  THE OLD MAID

  FROM THE WOOLWORTH TOWER

  AT NIGHT

  THE YEARS

  PEACE

  APRIL

  COME

  MOODS

  APRIL SONG

  MAY DAY

  CROWNED

  TO A CASTILIAN SONG

  BROADWAY

  A WINTER BLUEJAY

  IN A RESTAURANT

  JOY

  IN A RAILROAD STATION

  IN THE TRAIN

  TO ONE AWAY

  SONG

  DEEP IN THE NIGHT

  THE INDIA WHARF

  I SHALL NOT CARE

  DESERT POOLS

  LONGING

  PITY

  AFTER PARTING

  ENOUGH

  ALCHEMY

  FEBRUARY

  MORNING

  MAY NIGHT

  DUSK IN JUNE

  LOVE-FREE

  SUMMER NIGHT, RIVERSIDE

  IN A SUBWAY STATION

  AFTER LOVE

  DOORYARD ROSES

  A PRAYER

  INDIAN SUMMER

  THE SEA WIND

  THE CLOUD

  THE POOR HOUSE

  NEW YEAR’S DAWN — BROADWAY

  THE STAR

  DOCTORS

  IN THE CARPENTER’S SHOP

  THE CARPENTER’S SON

  THE MOTHER OF A POET

  RIVERS TO THE SEA

  IN MEMORIAM F. O. S.

  TWILIGHT

  SWALLOW FLIGHT

  THOUGHTS

  TO DICK, ON HIS SIXTH BIRTHDAY