SOURCE: “Look to the Stars,” in Sara Teasdale, Twayne Publishers, 1986.

[In the following essay from her biographical and critical study of Teasdale and her work, Schoen examines Teasdale's most prolific period.]

The years between the publication of Rivers to the Sea and Flame and Shadow represent the period of Teasdale's greatest fame, during which she became one of the most popular poets in America with critical approbation that gave her a national reputation. At one point in 1917 she had three different volumes available: Rivers to the Sea, which had gone into its fourth printing; The Answering Voice, her anthology of women's love lyrics; and Love Songs, a collection of her own old and new poetry. Her poems were widely anthologized, translated into many different languages, and often set to music. She received national prizes for her work and herself served as judge for other awards. The facts of her life, however, present a scene of continuing illness and depression, of a marital relationship that was seriously flawed, and of a movement toward the withdrawal that was to cloud her later years. Nevertheless, she threw herself into work, undertaking a number of new projects, and while the quantity of new poems diminished, the quality took significant leaps forward. She no longer questioned her right to be a poet, and during these years she revised her relationship to her art from one of a debt to be paid to “a refuge for my spirit's sake, / A house of shining words.”

Even her technique was revised to produce sharper, more compressed images within a looser structure. And instead of the wistful melancholy of her earlier work, there is now a clear-eyed facing of the pains of life. Like Christina Rossetti, like her own image of Sappho, she envisaged the pain of life as the necessity for art. The ideas that emerge from the poems include a belief that she could achieve self-reliance by force of will alone, that she could face the storms of life without asking for pity. With ironic self-detachment she cataloged her torments in verse. The poems of this period reflect not simply the “loneliness of a woman beloved,” as one critic has said, but the inescapable loneliness of life.¹

The problems that Teasdale and her husband were facing in their marriage were carefully masked from the outside world, and she made every effort to present a view of the blissfully happy bride. One of her friends from her days with the Potters recalled a visit during the year they lived in St. Louis:

Ernest came in. Her whole face lighted up with joy, her sherry-brown eyes sparkled, she opened her arms wide, and he stooped to embrace her closely. I was a trifle embarrassed to be the witness of such a passionate love-scene, but Sara's gesture was perfectly spontaneous and natural.²

They also made an effort to find activities they could share, reading together and even writing poems together. Filsinger was well read and a lover of poetry, but he had little gift for verbal expression, and the venture soon died. “The Lighted Window” and “A Winter Bluejay” included in Rivers are among those recorded as joint efforts. Another instance where Teasdale put her husband's initial, as well as her own, at the end of a poem of joint authorship was “Song Making,” which existed first as her own poem in the notebook, heavily revised and finally crossed out with the note “for improved version see 5 pages.” But even the second copy with which Filsinger apparently helped her was changed yet again before its publication in the Yale Review. A few jointly written poems on pacifist themes grew out of their distaste for the World War. Filsinger's German heritage must have made the war difficult to accept, and Teasdale's antiwar feelings had probably developed during her years of friendship with Marion Cummings. Both were tolerant of a wide range of expression in print, regardless of their own particular tastes, and together they signed a petition organized by H. L. Mencken and addressed to the Postmaster General of the United States, protesting the banning of Theodore Dreiser's The Genius. They shared in Teasdale's career, with Filsinger undertaking to read her poetry in public when she was too shy to do so herself. His obvious adoration of his wife and the mutual respect and affection they had for each other sustained the relationship during the first years of their marriage even though her severe infection with its excruciating pain meant separation, hospitalization, and finally a stay at Cromwell Hall. Equally, perhaps more important in keeping them apart were the long hours Filsinger spent at his work.

When the couple moved to New York, living, as in St. Louis, in residential hotels to spare Teasdale the trouble of running a home, they resumed their friendship with the literary group associated with the more progressive members of the Poetry Society and other like-minded poets, including Padraic Colum, Witter Brynner, E. L. Masters, Thomas Jones, William and Stephen Benét, Amy Lowell, Jessie Rittenhouse, Robert Frost, and, of course, John Wheelock. Among Teasdale's outings were visits, often with Wheelock as her escort, to Louis and Jean Untermeyer, who had “something a little bit like a salon.”³ She was particularly friendly with a group of women poets—Jean Starr Untermeyer, Aline Kilmer, Margaret Wilkinson, Margaret Widdemer—for whom she seemed, according to Wheelock, to have been a leader. But social events were strenuous for her and often left her exhausted owing to her extreme sensitivity, which was apparent to all who knew her. The joke in Vanity Fair about her sensitivity stemming from “having one layer of skin too few”⁴ was based on a remark she made to a friend that a doctor in St. Louis had made just such a diagnosis.

The exact nature of Teasdale's physical and mental distress during these years is only partially known. In addition to the bladder infection, Jean Gould suggests that she had a miscarriage in 1915,⁵ and Drake, with rather more reliable evidence, claims that she had an abortion in 1917.⁶ The poem “Debt” with its lines “The wrong is done, the seed is sown, / The evil stands” is cited by Drake as indicating her response to her decision. Given the statements in her own letters about wanting to be a mother, about wanting to get married so that she could have children, and the evidence of her poetry that had frequently discussed the subject, such a decision must have been an agonizing one. The factors that governed it would have been her own frail health and the demands of her career. But it was not a decision that she, with her conventional upbringing and puritan values, could easily dismiss or forget. It may have also seriously affected her relationship with her husband, partly because of her sense of guilt, but also from the purely practical standpoint of avoiding intimacies as a way of avoiding further pregnancies.

Filsinger's new position required an immense amount of traveling, which would have put the major burden of parenthood on Teasdale, but his frequent absences during this period were in and of themselves a cause of her depression. Despite the tensions that existed while they were together, Teasdale relied heavily on her husband's support. He handled most of her ever-increasing mail; until 1917 he had read her poetry at public gatherings because she was too sensitive to do it herself; and he would, with Will Parrish's help, take care of all the details of publishing The Answering Voice while she retreated to Cromwell Hall. More important, she relied on his emotional support. Excitable though he was, given to sudden outbursts of anger over minor inconveniences, he nevertheless worshiped his wife, considered himself blessed to have married such a “rare and wonderful” woman, never criticized her or refused any request. He bolstered her always fragile sense of self-worth and, in his absence, Teasdale seemed more prone to lapse into morbidity. She might leave him for “rest-cures,” as she did with increasing frequency, but when he left her she seems to have regarded it as a personal reproach.

In the first six months of 1918 alone Teasdale had gone off on five separate occasions to be by herself and recoup her flagging energies, finally going back for a month to the sanitarium in Connecticut. Filsinger continued to throw himself into his work and when the World War ended, prepared for extensive business trips, during 1919-20, first to Europe, then to South America, and, unexpectedly, back to Europe again, trips that kept them apart for almost a whole year. They had toyed with the notion of Teasdale accompanying him, but it is doubtful that either regarded it as a real possibility since she would never have managed the hectic schedule, the constant socializing, and the frequent moves from one uncomfortable hotel to another, for facilities in South America were often primitive and Europe was still recovering from the war's devastation. They did try one short trip together to Havana, Cuba, in December 1918, but the disruptions caused by a general strike made their stay an uncomfortable one. Even their brief period together between his first European trip and the one to South America was marred by a recurrence of her bladder inflammation and a respiratory infection.

POETIC THEORY

The wide variety of experiments in poetry during these years had aroused considerable discussion over the merits of the new poetry versus the traditional forms. Teasdale's statements about poetry indicate that she was pondering the arguments being offered by proponents of the new poetry. While she was able to appreciate many of their contributions, she was more inclined to defend the traditional forms with which she worked. The significance of melody was more carefully spelled out, the need for sincerity stressed.

Curiously, even as she was publicly aligning herself in the camp of the traditionalists, she was privately experimenting with the newer forms. Teasdale stated her position first in an interview with her old friend from the Poetry Society, William Stanley Brathwaite, which was printed in the Boston Evening Transcript on 5 August 1916. Equating the interest in the new poetry with changing fashions, she quoted Robert Browning as saying the styles in music change every thirty years, then added:

The styles in poetry change just as often, and if melody is rare in the most fashionable kinds of poetry today, it is because it was over-prominent in the verse of thirty years ago. We are experiencing a reaction from Swinburne, Kipling, and many lesser men who employed highly elaborate metres and rhyme-schemes.⁷

In calling the new verse a reaction, however, she did not intend a total condemnation, for the poets have, she said, “emphasized the necessity for precision, compression and visualization, and they have infinitely enlarged the subject matter of poetry.” What she did object to was the “tendency in some of the Imagists to dwell with a sort of self-conscious satisfaction on the frail and isolated beauties in nature or emotion. …”

What Teasdale prized in poetry was its ability to “deepen our sense of living” and “it makes little difference whether the poet accomplishes his object by the use of regular metre and rhyme or not.” Perhaps even more important for her was the melody of poetry, and it is interesting to note the significance she attributed to it: “… melody seems to be so magical a thing. Indeed we must admit its magic because many lyrics that have little else besides melody have become priceless treasures of our race.” It was here she cited Shakespeare's “Under the Greenwood Tree,” mentioned earlier.

Traditional verse had an advantage that free verse lacked—“it is so easily remembered.” The same idea was reiterated in a letter to her husband:

My main idea is that … poetry has to have a certain smooth-flowing quality in order to be easily memorized—and that to be easily memorized is one of the reasons for poetry. … One is absolutely forced to believe that the melody is in itself valuable—only valuable though … when it is unforced and fresh and inevitable.⁸

An interview, really a written statement to the newspapers, in 1918, elaborated her notions that the controversy over poetic forms was not the central issue:

If a poem is of any value it must spring directly from the experience of the writer—not necessarily from an external experience but at least from a spiritual one. If a poem is sincere and springs from deep emotion, no matter what the form, it will be of value to us.⁹

But the issue of poetic form continued to attract public attention and Teasdale could not stay out of the fray. She responded to Harriet Monroe's editorial in the March 1919 issue of Poetry on Max Eastman's conservative stance by writing a long letter intended for publication, withdrawing permission by telegram, however, immediately after mailing it to Chicago. In the letter she pointed to reliance of much of the “new poetry” on traditional, though foreign, poetry, which itself followed set standards for length of line and rhythms. She explained the modern poets' use of free verse “for the very good reason that they felt they can render what H. M. called ‘the old pagan clarity’ better in this way,” but went on to justify metered verse. She praised the conventions, saying,

They enhance the fun of the game as the conventions enhance the fun of life. Could poetry be written conforming to more rigid laws, to take only one instance, than the Sapphics and the Alcaics of Sappho? … These fragments of hers have come down to us because the old grammarians preserved them as perfect examples of certain verse forms. No one would venture to say that Sappho would have written poetry more austerely beautiful if she had composed it in the complete freedom of vers libre.¹⁰

Again Teasdale was not here rejecting free verse, and she was careful to add, “No one could be more grateful than I, for the beauty they have given us in the new forms.” The standard forms of poetry continued to be useful for Teasdale for their music and because the stanza by its very artifice and artificiality provided a distancing mechanism through which she could pour out her innermost thoughts without the sense of writing overpersonal confessions. She was aware, however, of the ways in which those forms could be inhibiting, describing the Poetry Society, their staunchest supporter, as a “hopeless place if one is expecting any spiritual awakening.”¹¹

Teasdale discussed her own sense of creativity in a statement she sent to Marguerite Wilkinson, who was preparing a book on modern poetry entitled New Voices. She placed central importance on the emotional aspect, saying: “My theory is that poems are written because of a state of emotional irritation. … The emotional irritation springs, probably, from subconscious combinations of partly forgotten thoughts and feelings.”¹² The emotions may stem from actual or imaginary experience, both equally forceful, but “in either case the poem is written to free the poet from an emotional burden. Any poem not so written is only a piece of craftsmanship.” The idea of a poem is, she felt, a light toward which the poet is groping and around which he walks, “so to speak, looking at it from all sides, trying to see which aspect of it is the most vivid. When he has hit upon what he believes is his peculiar angle of vision, the poem is fairly begun.” The first line is crucial, setting the rhythm for the poem as a whole, and she describes it as “floating toward him with a charming definiteness of color and music.”

Although she discounts the importance of form, which she says “should be engrossing neither to the poet nor to the reader,” she does speak of the advantages of the traditional forms, which, being familiar, “carry the reader swiftly and easily to the heart of the poem. They do not astonish and bewilder him. Care needs to be taken to avoid dull and unconvincing sing-song.” Brief lyrical poems need to be created in the poet's mind before being set down on paper and

In the process of molding his idea into a poem the poet will be at white heat of intellectual and emotional activity, bearing in mind that every word, every syllable, must be an unobtrusive and yet an indispensable part of his creation. Every beat of his rhythm, the color of each word, the ring of each rhyme must carry his poem, as a well-laid railway track carries a train of cars smoothly to its destination.¹³

The qualities that Teasdale singled out as dangers—“the amazing word, the facile inversion, the clever twist of thought”—were among those features that were being regarded as values. It was just such strictures that would prevent her from a more total commitment to the new poetry. Yet she was not against the idea that a poem might be thought-provoking, for though she believed that the “reader must be left free to feel and not think while he is reading a poem,” she added, “the thinking should come afterward.”

Teasdale's appreciation of what was happening in poetry was a limited one, and she was unaware of the demand for psychological probing and intellectual rigor that was to dominate poetry for many years. She could not foresee that the increased compression that would turn a poem, as she had written to Page some years before, from a “flower” into a “nut” would soon become a value, not a fault. Nor could she foresee how the “change in styles” would leave her own poetry ignored by serious critics. In many respects she had already adopted some of the standards that were being enunciated; her own poetry was increasingly precise in its word choice, its tendency to wordiness had been tamed, and more attention was being paid to creating an objectification of emotion. And certainly she had been among the first to enlarge the subject matter of poetry. Now she was to embark on other changes. But the one virtue of traditional poetry that Teasdale could not abandon and that prevented more serious excursions into free verse was her concern for melody. The words she used in the interview with Brathwaite to talk about it are significant—it was magic. Her almost primitive response to the incantatory power of song provides much of the power of her better work.

Teasdale's defense of her own method of creation did not interfere with her appreciation of many of the volumes of new poetry that were being published, and the opportunity to prove her open-mindedness came when she was asked to serve as one of the three judges for the poetry prize in 1918. Although the choice was theoretically limited to nominated volumes, she read all the major volumes of poetry published for the year and arranged the nomination of the one she preferred. Her first choice was Carl Sandburg's Cornhuskers, which she felt was head and shoulders above the rest, although she also liked works by E. L. Masters, Conrad Aiken, and Lola Ridge.¹⁴ Her two fellow judges, Professors William Lyons Phelps and Richard Burton, she was shocked to discover, had ruled out all free verse, and it took all her powers of persuasion to get them to agree to make a joint award to Sandburg along with their selection, Margaret Widdemer. Widdemer's poetry was a typical example of what Emily Stipes Watt's identifies as the “female lyricist”¹⁵—the small, neat, dainty lyrics, the tone of wistful melancholy, a sense of imagery for decorative purposes, coupled with deft craftsmanship. To this category Teasdale, Millay, Wylie, and Reese are still frequently and erroneously assigned.

THE ANSWERING VOICE

Teasdale's next project brought her to the forefront of those concerned with feminist issues at the time even as it placed her with the supporters of traditional verse. She had spent most of the first year of her marriage putting together Rivers to the Sea and because of its huge success her publisher was anxious to bring out another volume of her work, but there were too few new poems for such a purpose. She had continued to write, but at a slower pace and fewer of the finished works seemed worth publication. As a substitute, Teasdale suggested an anthology of women's love poems. While she had frequently derided the radical women's militancy and had avoided any unconventional freedoms herself, she nonetheless was aware of the problems women faced and was anxious to solidify their position as artists. She seems also to have planned an article on women poets, for the flyleaf of one of her poetry notebooks lists several names for that purpose. Her acceptance by the established poets after her first visit to New York may have momentarily blurred this issue, but her awareness of the difference between her ideal view of marriage and her actual experience of it may have brought home to her the need to reassess other women's responses to love.

Just one hundred poems would be included. Since she was still living in St. Louis at the time and was in poor health, her husband and her sister Mamie, to whom the book was dedicated, brought books to her sickbed and numerous literary friends were solicited for possible inclusions, with the title suggested by John Wheelock. The goals that she wished to achieve in this anthology were stated, in part, in the one-page introduction she wrote, noting that before the nineteenth century “… for reasons well known to the student of feminism, sincere love poems by women were very rare in England and America,” but that “since the middle of the last century, the works of women have compared favorably with that of men. …” Because “the finest utterance of women's hopes has been on love,” her aim was to produce, alluding to Palgrave's anthology, a “golden treasury of lyrics by women.”¹⁶

Many of the poets she included are still highly respected today: she used five poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and five by Christina Rossetti, two by Emily Dickinson (in versions available at that time, which seriously distort their real meaning), and one by Edna St. Vincent Millay. She also included works by fine poets such as Lizette Woodworth Reese, Louise Imogen Guiney, Anna Hempstead Branch, and Ella Wilcox Wheeler, whose reputations have been obscured by the radical shift in poetic taste that marked the first half of the twentieth century. Her sense of good manners and shrewd politics may have been responsible for the inclusion of poems by three friends from the Potters group, three poems by Zoö Akins, and works by new friends who were influential in her career—Jessie Rittenhouse, Harriet Monroe, Amy Lowell, Marguerite Wilkinson, and Margaret Widdemer. Four poems by her childhood favorite, A. Mary F. Robinson, as well as a number of forgotten poets, filled out the volume.

From the poems in the anthology it is clear that the music of the verses is the most outstanding common denominator. Purity of intent rather than tension or ambiguity was preferred, and images from nature dominate, with the pain of unfulfilled love the general theme. Resignation or death are seen as the only alternatives to this unhappy state. The poems, in fact, sum up the conventional women's view with all the melancholy, submissiveness, girlish coquettishness, death-haunted love that distinguished almost all of women's love poems at that time. The frequency of bird images and of sanctuaries affirms Cheryl Walker's thesis that these were the only escapes that most women could find from their sense of entrapment.¹⁷

As a whole, the volume stands as a testament to all the standards of poetry by women that Teasdale herself was outgrowing. It is as if the preparation of this volume had led Teasdale to evaluate the poetry of women and to find it inadequate to her needs. The anthology was nevertheless popular, and while most reviewers noted its “charm and beauty,”¹⁸ others were less charitable. Conrad Aiken complained that it did not show “what a woman really thinks,”¹⁹ expecting, perhaps, the bolder statements that were only then in the process of being written. But if modern readers are disappointed, it should be noted that, as Drake points out, Teasdale was “the first to compile an anthology setting forth a coherent picture of women's attitudes toward love.”²⁰ It gave the older generation a sense of what their experience had been, and it gave the new generation an idea of how their own perceptions might reassess the view of a woman's world and her feelings.

LOVE SONGS

Teasdale was anxious also to bring out another volume of her own poetry, but she found very few of her few of her new poems worthy of reprinting. Her notebooks show that she was embarking on a number of false paths. On two occasions she wrote poems for specific situations—one an ode on Shakespeare's mother for the Drama Guild of St. Louis's commemoration of the tercentenary of Shakespeare's death; the other, on the same theme requested by William Stanley Brathwaite, for a similar occasion in Boston. Disappointed with both efforts, she vowed never to write poetry to order again. But even on her own she seems to have had difficulty finding a form for her feelings. On one occasion she wrote a long, gory, balladlike poem about St. Kevin, who threw a woman off the cliffs because she tempted him to be untrue to his vows of celibacy; at other times she tried out poems about an old man, about the ships in the harbor at Charlevoix, about Newark, New Jersey. Not only were there many poor pieces, but also her own critical attitude toward her poetry had sharpened. To make a complete volume, she decided to reprint the best of her earlier work for a book entitled Love Songs. Of the approximately seventy-five poems she wrote between 1915 and 1917, less than twenty were considered worthy for this new book, although quite a few later found their way into Flame and Shadow. It was the most successful volume she ever published, the first edition selling out in only two months and six editions published within a year. It also received the first national poetry prize ever awarded, the Columbia Poetry Prize, a precursor of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, which had been omitted when those prizes were first conceived.

The inclusion of so many early poems with the new creations has masked the significant steps forward that Teasdale had been making, which can be seen particularly in one group of poems, published as a unit called “Songs of Sorrow.” They form a true poetic unity, the fruit of her struggle to achieve a larger structure for her work. Her previous attempts had been to group poems by form in her first two books, or by a narrative structure in the first part of Rivers, or by particular images—the city and the sea—to unify other sections. In “Songs out of Sorrow” the unity is provided by a single metaphor transformed from earthbound to spiritual significance. Written for the most part during the summer of 1916 when she was at Cromwell Hall, they present a serious reappraisal of her life similar to the one she had made after her visit with Marion Cummings Stanley—the need to be self-reliant, to find within herself the strength and reason to live. The opening poem, “Spirit's House,” announces the poet's determination to make use of the pain of life:

From naked stones of agony
I will build a house for me;
As a mason all alone
I will raise it, stone by stone,
And every stone where I have bled
Will show a sign of dusky red.
I have not gone the way in vain,
For I have good of all my pain;
My spirit's quiet house will be
Built of naked stones I trod
On roads where I lost sight of God.

Its theme is like Rossetti's in “From House to Home” which described a woman who “measured measureless sorrow towards its length, and breadth and depth and height” and who could endure and create song from the experience, suggesting that “for the woman poet only renunciation or even anguish, can be a suitable source of song.”²¹ In Teasdale's poem these stones of agony become the substitute sanctuary to replace her former belief in God. It is the very pain of loss of faith that will become her refuge.

The self-reliance is carried forward in the next two poems, “Mastery” and “Lessons.” In “Mastery,” the poet says

I would not have a god come in
To shield me suddenly from sin
And set my house of life to rights.

Knowing how frequently the word god has been used in her poems for husband or lover, the poem clearly marks her declaration of independence. As a poem of a married woman, it is in marked contrast to the traditional image of the wife's dependence on her husband that Teasdale, and many women of her generation, had accepted. If in “Mastery” she rejects the help of those stronger than herself, in “Lessons” she realizes the futility of seeking help from those weaker. She must learn “to seek no strength in waving reeds / Nor shade beneath a straggling pine.”

The cost of such an attitude is not belittled. In the next poem, “Wisdom,” she notes that cost, once she gives up complaints about the imperfections of life and accepts compromise.

When I have ceased to break my wings
Against the faultiness of things,
And learned that compromises wait
Behind each hardly opened gate,
When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth
And taken in exchange—my youth.

Not only life but also death must be faced, and in “In a Burying Ground” the poet imagines that her body will be the source of flower's beauty, a reflection of the Whitmanesque image of grass as “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” The image of beauty unites this poem with the next, “Wood Song,” in which the poet hears a bird song composed of just three notes. Inspired by the wood thrush's ability and willingness to create beauty with the limited resources at its disposal, she exclaims, “I caught life back against my breast / And kissed it, scars and all.” Now the poet looks back at the “stones of agony” of the first poem and finds new meaning—her refuge is in her art—

From my spirit's gray defeat,
From my pulse's flagging beat,
From my hopes that turned to sand,
Sifting through my close-clenched hand,
From my own fault's slavery,
If can sing, I still am free.
For with my singing I can make
A refuge of my spirit's sake,
A house of shining words, to be
My fragile immortality.

The house of stone has become a house of song.

While the sequence may be too preachy for modern ears, if it is too insistent on the power of the will to overcome difficulties, it does represent a significant step forward for Teasdale as a woman in its rejection of the submissive wife, rejecting sentimentality, praising strength, power over the self, and as a poet determined to use her art in more significant ways.

The simplicity of the “Songs out of Sorrow” is countered by the more complex tone of the poem Teasdale used to open the volume. “Barter” is one of her most popular poems, but its underlying tension is often missed.

Life has loveliness to sell,
And beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.
Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.
Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.

The poem extols the pleasures of living. The basic metaphor is of a market transaction, a feature more strongly apparent in an earlier version copied in her notebook. There it was entitled “Buying Loveliness” and the first line of the second stanza was “Life will not give but she will sell.”²² Most of the poem recounts moments of beauty with such rich imagery that it is easy to forget there is a price to pay—sights full of color, sounds, scents, tactile sensations, the physical joys producing spiritual contentment. And the cost, stated in the last four lines, is presented in such a straightforward way that it is easy to lose sight of how expensive it is. One hour of peace may demand years of pain; a breath of ecstasy, no longer than a moment or two, may cost all one's past or future. The tone is not rueful or bitter; the proposition is no more sentimental than any business deal. The ironic note is understood only after one reflects on the poem.

In the other new poems in the volume Teasdale makes a few interesting and somewhat different notes about love. There is a plea for a more passionate lover and the awareness of the waywardness of her affections. As poems written by a married woman, they suggest a serious revision of the conventional attitude. It is as if she had found that the accepted image of the wife did not fit the facts of an intelligent, passionate woman's spirit. The desire for a more passionate relation is masked in “Because,” but it is nonetheless there. Written while Ernst was on a business trip, it seems to praise him for his gentleness and consideration, “Oh, because you never tried / To bow my will or break my pride, / and nothing of the caveman made. …” But then it goes on to say, “Take me.” Repeated three times, the imperative “take” seems as if the poet is pleading with her lover to be more aggressive. Although she was married, she was aware, as she wrote in “Doubts,” that she could only guarantee the fidelity of her body, but not her soul, which was “a wild, gay adventurer; / A restless and eager wraith” that might break “faith with you.” In “The Wind” she acknowledges the limits of love: “There is no peace for me on earth, / Even with you.” Instead of inspiring her to new creativity, she found that marriage was stultifying. In “House of Dreams” she compliments her husband for fulfilling all her dreams but goes on to say that “the empty dreams were dim, / And the empty dreams were wide” and now they have come true, her “thoughts have no place now to play / And nothing now to do.” Even her sense of creativity has been crushed. In “Tree of Song” she announces that she cannot write poems to her husband. “I sang my songs for the rest, / For you, I am still … / The tree of song stands bare.” Where a love relationship is mentioned, it is often about a remembered one, as in “Spring Rains” or “The Ghost” or “Jewels,” in which her memories are like the jewels women put away “and cannot wear in sober day,” that is, in the reality of her new situation as a married woman.

The long monologue with which the volume ends harks back to her days in New York before her marriage, and in its opening goes back farther still to the medieval fairy-tale images of her days in St. Louis, which show her merging memory and imagination into dream. Like a king and queen, the narrator and her lover sit on the top of one of the old two-story buses that used to travel up and down Fifth Avenue and “watch our subjects with a naughty joy.” Reaching the park, they walk through the wintry landscape, imagining a fairy ring around the bench on which they once sat, recalling former scenes and admiring the stars' reflections in the lake. As they walk, however, the mists gather, “the curtain of fog / Making it strange to all the friendly trees.” Even her companion grows strange and far as he walks ahead of her, and at the end she imagines the park as theirs alone, “We are alone now in a fleecy world; / Even the stars have gone. / We two alone!” While it is tempting to speculate whether the poet-lover is Lindsay or Wheelock, the atmosphere of the poem suggests that the man is as much an imaginary character in the dream that Teasdale has created from bits of reality.

Several poems do speak of her happiness with her husband, such as “Dew,” “Thought,” and “Riches,” but the preponderant message is one of protest, confusion, doubt about the role she is expected to play or the emotions she is expected to feel. Teasdale had been more honest in these poems than she had ever been before, but she had found a convenient mask in burying them with her other, more lighthearted, poems.

FLAME AND SHADOW

The culmination of this five-year period came with the publication of a new collection of poems, Flame and Shadow, in 1920. The changes in theme, technique, and attitude that were developing over these years are increasingly apparent in this new volume.

In part, Teasdale's new approach may have stemmed from her reading during this period, which is interesting for certain changes it reveals. Just before her marriage she had read all of the three volumes of Emily Dickinson then available, and two volumes of Frost's, adding the third in the next year. In addition to reading the new works by her friends, she also started to read critical works such as Van Wyck Brook's America's Coming of Age, Lowell's Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, as well as a number of novels by Henry James and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. An unusual book on her list is Evelyn Underhill's Practical Mysticism.

Yeats's poetry, however, became her favorite. She had heard him speak in New York in 1914, and again in 1919 in Santa Barbara, and his name appears frequently in her reading notebook during these years. She wrote Harriet Monroe, “I have been reading Yeats furiously again. He is the greatest living poet without the shadow of a doubt.”²³ Her appreciation of Yeats was stressed again when, in answer to a request from the librarian of a small college in Missouri, she supplied a list of modern poets that might be included in their collection. In addition to mentioning Frost, Robinson, Sandburg, Aiken, Markham, and Dickinson, “the most gifted woman poet America has ever had,” she added, “I should buy everything of W. B. Yeats' at the very first. He is the supreme artist writing in our tongue today.”²⁴ When she saw the librarian's final selection and noted that Yeats's Wild Swans at Coole had been omitted, she sent him a copy of it. Teasdale also had the opportunity of meeting Yeats when he lectured in Santa Barbara, where she had gone for the winter of 1919-20 while her husband was on his extended business trip. Yeats's poetic career had traced many of the same paths as Teasdale's, from the hazy medievalism of the late nineteenth century to the sharper, more natural diction with an emphasis on the expression of the poet's sensibility rather than concern with moral uplift and preachiness. And unlike many of the other modern poets, Yeats had retained the primacy of melody in his verse.

One of the major effects of reading Yeats, as well as other modern poets, was the change in technique that appears for the first time in the poems in Flame and Shadow. Amy Lowell, in a congratulatory letter on the appearance of the poem “Places” in the June 1919 issue of Scribner's said, “The effect you get by your non-scanable metrical lines is perfectly charming. I remember your telling me in New York that you were experimenting in this sort of thing, and I want to tell you that I think your experiment is highly successful.”²⁵ While that poem might seem, to modern readers, quite regular, the lines varying no more than one or two syllables from the standard twelve-beat measure established in the opening, it represents a significant shift from the absolute precision that had marked her earlier work. A more obvious example of the new approach is one of her best loved poems, “Let It Be Forgotten.”

Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,
Let it be forgotten for ever and ever,
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.
If anyone asks, say it was forgotten
Long and long ago,
As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall
In a long forgotten snow.

The poem, she had written Eunice Tietjens, “was written almost entirely without intervention by my brains. It simply was in my mind. But I was broad awake all the time and could not be said to be in a subconscious state.”²⁶ The poem owes much to one by A. Mary F. Robinson that had been included in The Answering Voice. A comparison between the two reveals how far Teasdale had surpassed her early favorite:

II
Let us forget we love each other much,
Let us forget we ever had to part,
Let us forget that any look or touch
Once let in either to the other's heart.
Only we’ll sit upon the daisied grass
And hear the larks and see the swallows pass;
Only we’ll live awhile, as children play,
Without to-morrow, without
yesterday.

“Rispetto”²⁷

Robinson's poem, reflecting the carpe diem theme, is a charming plea for enjoyment of the moment. The images of the “daisied grass” and the flying birds are pleasant enough, but they add nothing to the depth of the thought, and the repeated “Let us forget” with its slightly rueful tone, somewhat clashes with the call to pleasure that is the main substance of the verse.

For Teasdale, the opening phrase assumes greater significance, controlling the whole poem. By changing the verb tense, Teasdale has moved it from a simple suggestion to complex advice. The phrase “let it be forgotten” implies the existence of events that, having happened some time in the past, continue to plague the mind, and each item she lists becomes a symbol of just such moments—the flower, the remembrance of a love affair; the fire, the warmth and beauty of a passion; the snow, the cold sterility after love has gone. The harshness of the last line of the first stanza cuts through the threatened sentimentality with its blunt reminder that old age brings dimmer mental powers, its dissonance clashing with the smooth harmony of the preceding lines. But the power of the poem lies also in the shrewd use of psychology. The insistent pounding of the word forgotten plays on the mind's tendency to store concepts in groups of opposites. Hearing “forgotten,” the reader will also hear the echoing “remember.” And if the memories were not so strong, there would be no need to insist on forgetting; in fact, each line, instead of aiding in the process of eliminating the thoughts, conjures up all the associations that might collect around a particular flower, a special fire. And the final image, with its allusion to a poem by François Villon unforgotten after six centuries—“Ou sont les nieges d’antan?” (Where are the snows of yesterday?)—underlines the contradictions in the message; in insisting on forgetfulness, the poem actually strengthens memory.

The poem is also a technical tour de force. The chantlike quality of the repeated opening phrase is heightened by the use of the word forgotten six times in eight lines, yet monotony is avoided by the careful placement of the word within each of the lines. The first time it is used it is given its usual pronunciation with the stress on the second syllable, the next time, in the same line, it receives a strong secondary stress on the last syllable. In the last line equal stress is given to all three syllables. The varying length of the lines reveals Teasdale's skill with her new form. Instead of measuring her lines by the number of syllables in each, she is now measuring them by the number of stressed syllables—there are three stresses per line, while the syllable count varies from fourteen in the first to a mere five in the sixth. Yet the poem retains the same melodic harmony that was always Teasdale's basic requirement for her “songs.”

In moving away from metrical regularity Teasdale was adopting the chanted cadences from the earliest sources of poetry, rather than recreating the rhythmic patterns of natural speech, which Frost, for instance, was in the process of developing. But the verbal insistence on forgetting coupled with the implied remembering provides the perfectly balanced opposition that make this one of Teasdale's finest achievements.

In organizing the poems for Flame and Shadow Teasdale was working toward a new sense of cohesiveness within the volume, the balancing of opposites providing the basic structure. The arrangement of the poems, she wrote her husband, “will serve to show that the many short poems are in reality one life poem, or parts of it. I have managed it so that each poem has congenial companions on either side of it.”²⁸ The title, derived from a line of Victor Hugo's, used as the epigraph, “Recois la flamme ou l’ombre / De tous mes jours” (Remember the flame or the shadow all my days) enunciates the pattern. But the meanings given to the two key images vary and the distinctions are not always clear. In the first section Flame represents the brightness of life, while in section 2, “Memories,” Shadow is the dimmer light of recollection. Thereafter, the images of light and dark are mingled within the sections. Section 3, which is chiefly centered around her husband, considers both the brightness and darkness of married love, while section 4, “In a Hospital,” considers the darkness of physical pain and the new flashes of light she finds from it. The pain of memory, its darker side, dominates section 5, the poems concerned mainly with her feelings for Wheelock, yet some brightness is treasured. Thoughts of death in “The Dark Cup” bring forth both sorrow and wisdom that are its “flame and shadow.” In section 6, the poet contrasts the value and cost of her lonely communion with nature, while section 7 considers those factors that dim human perception, ending with a poem in praise of “Lovely Chance.” In section 8 the darkness and destruction of war stand against the eternal renewal of nature. In “By the Sea,” section 9, the unending power of the sea brings forth both negative and positive feelings. The value and difficulties of the solitary life are considered in section 10, while section 11, the least clear of all, reflects on the sad effects of change that are visible versus other unchanging, but hidden values. The last section, “Songs for Myself,” affirms the value of the self with its ability to accept the mixed quality of life, bringing back the flame of the title.

The opening poem of the first section, “Blue Squills,” sets the tone not only for the first section but for the entire volume, in its contrast between the beauty of spring and the inevitability of death. By placing her own life as only a moment within the eons of life on earth—

How many million Aprils came
Before I ever knew
How white a cherry bough could be,
A bed of squills, how blue.

she captures the fleetingness of her perception of beauty. With this knowledge she pleads,

Oh burn me with your beauty,
… Wound me, that I, through endless sleep
May bear the scar of you.

The “flame” of beauty and the “shadow” of the pain from the intensity of her response can together provide a kind of immortality. Other sources of brightness are detailed in the section in addition to the beauties of the earth—the beauty of the skies, the knowledge of her own strengths, of song, the feelings of passion, even the rest that death might bring.

One of the joys detailed in this opening, the power of “song,” and of sound in general, is examined throughout the book in close detail. In the opening it is both extolled in “Meadowlarks” as “the white flying joy when a song is born” yet limited to being a minor part of herself in “What Do I Care?”, the poem written in response to Untermeyer's criticism that her poems do not show her intelligence.²⁹ Music is the medium for her memories in “Places,” where “places I love come back to me like music” and the sounds of the ship's engine and the man's voice “speaking, hushed, insistent, / At midnight, in mid-ocean, hour on hour to me” preserve the memory. In the same way the “Redbirds” bring back the memories of her visits to Saxton's Hill, the place outside St. Louis she had explored with her friends in her youth. The sounds of the wind carry the voice of her lover. But it is her own power to create song that provides joy, best expressed in “Compensation,”

I should be glad of loneliness
And hours that go on broken wings,
A thirsty body, a tired heart
And the unchanging ache of things,
If I could make a single song
As lovely and as full as light,
As hushed and brief as a falling star
On a winter night.

But song has its limitations. In “The Net” it fails to capture the special qualities of her lover, “I made you many and many a song, / Yet never one told all you are.” Nor does she feel that her gift of poetry is within her control; like the ripe fruit on a tree in “My Heart is Heavy,” she feels that “my songs do not belong to me.” Although she has known “the deep solace of song” (“The Dreams of My Heart”) yet it is as short-lived as “the bright frailty of foam” (“A Little While”).

Far more disturbing is her realization in “In Spring, Santa Barbara” that pain is a necessity for creating her poems and that despite the happiness she feels at the prospect of her lover's return, “I have been as still as stone, / My heart sings only when it breaks.” If that is so, however, then song can become a value, for with it she can “like barley bending … / rise from pain” and, change my sorrow / Into song.” Further, her poetry has the value of providing a kind of immortality, as in the poem “It Will Not Change,” originally entitled “Love,” where “It will live on / In all my songs for you / When I am gone.” But the cost is high, as she explains in “Song Making”: “I had to take my own cries / And thread them into a song.”³⁰ It is the price that she must pay for having lived—“But oh, the debt is terrible, / That must be paid in song.”

The place of song, her sense of herself as a creative artist, has changed from the sense of being the “refuge” that it had been in Rivers to the Sea, to a debt. She has rationalized her right to be a poet and no longer is concerned about the propriety of her decision to have a career as she had been in her earlier books. In fact, she feels her ability to create is outside her control. But while the gift of poetry was in the “Sappho” poems a debt incurred in exchange for life and love, it is now a debt exchanged for life alone.

The love that she had dreamed of had not materialized. And it is precisely the failure of that kind of love that these poems document. That failure may have been due to the nature of her husband's love; his adoration of her as a “rare and wonderful” goddess placed her on a pedestal that might have inhibited normal human affection. Or the failure may have been due to Filsinger's lack of passion. Teasdale's puritanical background has frequently been cited as a causative factor and it is certainly true that few if any human relationships could have lived up to her over-idealized expectations. In Rivers to the Sea she had expressed the belief that love would provide the inspiration necessary for the perception of “Beauty” and for the transmutation of beauty into poetry. Now she realized that love had failed.

A main point in this book is to question the position of women in marriage. Although in “Driftwood” she says one of the flames of her life has come from “my lovers … who gave the flame its changeful / and iridescent fires,” she decries the submissiveness that the married state demands of women in “Oh You Are Coming.” In that poem she is not afraid to say, “Are not my thoughts clearer than your thoughts / And colored like stones in a running stream?”—suggesting her belief that her intellect was equal to any man's, yet the independence that she feels entitled to is denied: “Oh why must I lose myself to love you, / My dear?” She does not deny the joy of love; she cries, “He is home, he is here / In the whole world no other / Is dear as my dear!” But in “The Mystery” she is aware of their separateness:

But when we look
At each other so
Then we feel
How little we know;
The spirit eludes us,
Timid and free—
Can I ever know you
Or you know me?

The lover's coming in “Eight O’Clock” may break the monotony of her hospital stay, but there is no sense that he can spare her pain. Passion itself is limited in “Spring Torrents,” where she feels herself “like a rock that knows the cry of waters / And cannot answer at all.” It is the memory of a lost love rather than the fulfilled one that provides the inspiration that creates her poetry, those memories “Deep in my heart they lie, / hidden in their splendor, / Buried like sovereigns in their robes of state.” But even there, the poet would not have her memories challenged by reality:

Let them not awake again, better to lie there,
Wrapped in memories, jewelled and arrayed—
Many a ghostly king has waked from death sleep
And found his crown stolen and his throne decayed.

If love fulfilled is inadequate and memory of lost love dangerously insubstantial, where then does a woman find her strength and a woman poet find the inspiration to transmute beauty into song? The first answer comes in the center of the book, in a poem entitled “The Dark Cup.” Five of the eight poems of this group were published originally in Contemporary Verse and received the award as the best work published in that magazine for 1920. The cup to which she refers is the cup of death, the image perhaps referring to the cup of hemlock that was presented to Socrates, about whom she had been reading during these years. But it is also the awareness of death that is the motive for making the most of life. In “Since There is no Escape” she says,

Let me go down as waves swept to the shore
In pride; and let me sing with my last breath;
In these few hours of light I lift my heart;
Life is my lover—

Flame and Shadow, 67

She hopes in “The Wine” that she might find “some shining strange escape” because she “sought in Beauty the bright wine of immortality.” A proud spirit defying death by asserting her love of life, she treasures the sensations she receives from the physical world even as she acknowledges its ugly aspects and the inevitability of death in “In a Cuban Garden” and even insists on a kind of life after death in which she and her lover will exist “beyond living, beyond dying, / Knowing and known unchangeable.” Her love of life is expressed in “June Night,” in a love of the physical beauty of the world. Thoughts of the lost love do not disappear; they serve only to accentuate the solitude of the poet in “I Thought of You” or turn out to be illusions in “In the End.”

Having chosen to replace love as the prime motive for life and art, Teasdale then chooses to replace the lover with the self, relying on its own ability to communicate with the natural world. In the unreality of a fog-shrouded world she reassures herself:

Here in a world without a sky,
Without the ground, without the sea,
The one unchanging this is I
Myself remains to comfort me.
“White Fog,”

Collected Poems

She finds a communion with ancient Greece through the shining of stars (“Arcturus”), expects that age will diminish the pain of unfulfilled passion (“Moonlight”), and although she knows that she may be lonely, she exclaims, “Only the lonely are free” (“Morning Song”). Fears of old age and death do not disappear, but she can praise “Lovely Chance” that has kept her whole. The failure of all mankind is encapsulated in the group of poems on the viciousness and hate of war from which the poet finds solace in the indifference of nature and in the “faithful beauty of the stars” (“Winter Stars”). Memories of the lover keep her company and suggest the possibility of some meeting after death, but it is her own thoughts that are her best companions: “When I am all alone / Envy me then, / For I have better friends / Than women and men” (“Thoughts”). People, in fact, are difficult to be with, even on a city street because she “cannot bear / The sorrow of the passing faces” (“Faces”) or the possibility that they may see hers. Aware that no one knows “another's heartbreak” and that death might be a release from pain, in the poem written in memory of her brother who died at the age of forty-seven after suffering from a stroke (“The Silent Battle”), she sees the self, “my innermost Me,” as the sanctuary that would give her the strength to accept life. But that self must give up love and hate, detach itself from the suffering of humanity, and even refuse the solace of prayer (“The Sanctuary”). Not always able to pay such a price, she is aware of “fear an unhealing wound in my breast” (“At Sea”).

The affirmation of the self finds its culmination in the last section, entitled “Songs for Myself.” The image of the unself-conscious tree represents the goal she seeks (“The Tree”), and all the achievements of life she has struggled so hard to attain have turned out to be hollow: “Even love … / And music and men's praise and even laughter / Are not so good as rest” (“At Midnight”). Poetry has demanded too high a price (“Song Making”); at times her loneliness seems too great to bear with only her “own spirit's pride” to keep her “from the peace of those / Who are not lonely, having died” (“Alone”). She fears the return of desire (“Red Maples”) yet her pride asserts itself in “Debtor” and she declares that

So long as my spirit still
Is glad of breath …
How can I quarrel with fate
Since I can see
I am a debtor to life,
Not life to me?

The final poem, “Wind in the Hemlock,” provides a summation, as Drake has pointed out,³¹ of the major theme of the volume. The opening two sections of this forty-line poem describe the night skies. No longer images of purity or divinity, she calls them “steely stars and moon of brass,” the metallic quality suggesting the machinelike world that mocks her mortality.

You know as well as I how soon
I shall be blind to stars and mood,
Deaf to the wind in the hemlock tree,
Dumb when the brown earth weighs on me.

She rages against the inevitability of death, seeing man as its slave, earth as a malign force “impatient for him since his birth.” These two stanzas show the failure of any item of nature as a reassurance, or source of comfort, or hope. Moving from these images in which she had previously found spiritual sustenance, she turns now to the tree. It is fragrant, it sings as the wind blows through it, it shelters the birds, and, most significantly, it knows neither anger nor doubt nor envy. From the serenity she finds in the hemlock, the poet derives the following message:

If I am peaceful, I shall see
Beauty's face continually:
Feeding on her wine and bread
I shall be wholly comforted,
For she can make one day for me
Rich as my lost eternity.

Beauty, the replacement for her lost religion, as the mention of “wine and bread” indicates, is available now only when she, like the hemlock, can achieve total acceptance of her mortal state. Love no longer functions as the catalyst. The lone tree, isolate, uncomplaining, is in its endurance able to nurture forces within itself that have been Teasdale's major symbols of creativity: the wind as the carrier of “the night-wind murmurs of the sea” with its sense of the deep inner drives of life, which relentlessly compel her even as they have overwhelmed her; and the bird, the image of the singer, able both to soar with the wind and to reflect the ordinary domestic life of a woman in her home. If she were like the tree, then she would be able to combine these three in her life—the elemental life force, the soaring spirit to catch the song, and the self to observe that sense of the world she calls beauty and transmute it into poetry.

Notes

1. Kreymbourg, Our Singing Strength, 447.

2. Quoted by Carpenter, Teasdale, 227.

3. Wheelock interview.

4. Quoted by Seon Manley and Susan Belcher, O Those Extraordinary Women (Philadelphia: Chilton Book Co., 1972), 284.

5. Jean Gould, American Women Poets (New York: Dodd Mead and Co., 1980), 108.

6. Drake, Sara Teasdale, 172.

7. Boston Evening Transcript, 5 August 1916.

8. Letter to Filsinger, 14 July 1916.

9. Quoted by Drake, Sara Teasdale, 175.

10. Letter to Harriet Monroe, 20 March 1919.

11. Letter to Harriet Monroe, 24 October 1918.

12. Letter to Marguerite Wilkinson, January 1919.

13. Ibid.

14. Letter to Harriet Monroe, 29 May 1918.

15. Watts, Poetry of American Women, 14.

16. Preface to The Answering Voice: One Hundred Love Lyrics by Women (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), ix.

17. Walker, Nightingale's Burden, xii.

18. Bookman, October 1917.

19. Conrad Aiken, Chicago News, 10 October 1917.

20. Drake, Sara Teasdale, 168.

21. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, 572.

22. Poetry Notebook.

23. Letter to Harriet Monroe, 6 April 1919.

24. Letters to Mr. Edwards, Librarian of William Jewell College, Missouri, 8 April 1920 and 23 July 1920. Courtesy of William Drake.

25. Letter from Amy Lowell to Sara Teasdale, 10 June 1919.

26. Letter to Eunice Tietjens, 1 April 1923.

27. Reprinted in The Answering Voice, 76.

28. Letter to Filsinger, 2 May 1920.

29. Drake, Sara Teasdale, 185.

30. The version quoted here is the one Teasdale published in Flame and Shadow and in the Collected Poems. A variant is published in Drake, Mirror of the Heart, 37.

31. Drake, Sara Teasdale, 204.