Out of the happiness, the joy, the sorrow, the “soul's distress and body's pain” of a sensitive woman, Sara Teasdale made seven volumes of verse, delicately but firmly wrought, simply but authoritatively stated. In them can be traced the record of a developing personality. Yet it is not a thoroughly complete personality that is therein expressed; for in spite of the sincerity and frankness with which are revealed some of the most intimate emotions possible to experience, there is also present a strong spirit of reticence surrounding what the poet says and, consequently, restricting what the reader may know.

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.

The same reticence marked Sara Teasdale's life. Few biographical facts are available. Few, indeed, are necessary; for, in the creation of poetry like hers, feelings are more important than dates, thoughts more important than events. Yet there can be sketched the life which formed a background for her work.

She was born August 8, 1884, in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest child of John Warren Teasdale and Mary Elizabeth Willard. Both on her father's and her mother's side, her family was old American. About the middle of the nineteenth century, both grandfathers left the eastern seaboard for the Middle West. They must have carried with them and handed down to their granddaughter a love of the sea; for though born in an inland city, she still could feelingly say

Tho I am inland far, I hear and know,
For I was born the sea's eternal thrall.

As a youngster she evinced a marked enjoyment of poetry. In later life she declared that her mother told “incredible tales” of the extremely early age at which she recited Mother Goose jingles. Since almost every mother has similar tales of children's precocity, this, in itself, is no means for distinguishing an embryonic poet. But very soon after the “See-Saw,” “Little Boy Blue” and “Ride-a-Cock-Horse” stage, the little girl was introduced to real poetry and of the poems she heard, Christina Rossetti's “Christmas Carol,” beginning, “In the bleak midwinter, frosty winds made moan,” soon became her favorite. “I think I liked it better than other poems,” she once said, “partly because snow is mentioned in it. I used to stand at the window during a snow-storm literally enchanted by the music of the lines.”

Sensitive, delicate, never strong, she was educated first at home, then at a private school for girls in St. Louis, where she first began her writing. She translated Heine and other German poets. She wrote some original verse. This was childish, unskillful, marked by an ineptitude of rhyme and manner which, she confessed, rose to haunt her in maturity.

But the girl persisted. After graduation from school in 1903, she continued her writing, disciplining and training herself in poetic technique. She and some friends brought out a monthly magazine, The Potter's Wheel, each issue consisting of a single copy, in manuscript, with original illustrations. This amateur magazine continued its existence for several years.

Shortly after her graduation, too, Sara Teasdale began to travel. Her journeyings through the western and southwestern parts of the United States are recalled in her poetry, as in “Night in Arizona,” with its local color touches of coyotes and crouching mountains. But the poems inspired by these and by her European travels give little indication of any intellectual curiosity on her part concerning the places visited, or of sympathy, or contact even, with people she must have seen. For the most part, new countries and new cities seemed merely to provide settings for her own highly personal feelings.

During her first trip abroad, which she began in 1905 and which took her to southern Europe, Greece, the Near East, Egypt, and the Holy Land, she wrote steadily. Upon her return in 1907 she received the first public acknowledgment of her ability. William Marion Reedy, who must be credited with innumerable literary discoveries, published in his Reedy's Mirror her poem, “Guenevere,” a blank verse monologue of Arthur's Queen, “branded for a single fault.”

But none will pity me, nor pity him
Whom Love so lashed, and with such cruel thongs.

The same year saw the publication of her first volume, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems, dedicated to her father and her mother. The adolescent phenomenon of the “crush” here found expression in verse. The book was the outpouring of a young girl's fancy and day-dreaming, undirected and untrained. The object of adoration was far off and, indeed, unknown; for Eleonora Duse, the Italian actress of the rich voice and dark, haunting eyes, was familiar to Sara Teasdale only in pictures, as she appeared in The Dead City or in the title role of Francesca da Rimini. The poems were equally far removed from a sense of reality. They were filled with personifications of Pain and of Delight, with Sicilian shepherds, Orphean lays, and lotus blossoms. They were marked by wild, if strongly felt, extravagance:

Alone as all the chosen are alone,
Yet one with all the beauty of the past.

Included, too, were several poems addressed to another idol, removed in time as well as in place, to Sappho, the Greek poetess; and a few most trivial lyrics. One may note in these poems a sense of form, facility particularly with the sonnet form, that held promise for future work. For the most part, however, the poems were such as might have been written by any well-brought-up young woman, well-read, thoughtful, and with a flair for writing.

The well-brought-up girl of that period, particularly one with any intellectual claims at all, felt that the immediate expression of emotions was not in good taste. On the other hand, it was impossible completely to repress all feelings. Sara Teasdale, caught with her contemporaries in the dilemma, found a way out. The feelings which she, herself, was experiencing she expressed in monologues as the thoughts of others and of them in 1911 made her next book of poems, Helen of Troy and Other Poems.

“Guenevere,” her first published poem, was included in this volume. In addition to the early British queen, other heroines became the mouthpiece for the poet's own deepest feelings: Sappho, Helen of Troy, Dante's love, Beatrice, to name but a few. Blank verse was the chosen meter for the poems, but used lightly, lyrically. Sappho sings:

Twilight has veiled the little flower face
Here on my heart, but still the night is kind,
And leans her warm sweet weight against my heart.

and Marianna Alcoforando, a Portuguese nun of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, in lines prophetic almost of Sara Teasdale's own later life, speaks in the same flowing meter:

And then I knew that Love is worth its pain
And that my heart was richer for his sake,
Since lack of love is bitterest of all.

But a large part of the book was made up of something much more personal, intimate, and subjective than the longer poems in blank verse. The poet overcame some of the diffidence of the self-controlled young woman and spoke, at last, in her own person. A woman's attitude toward love—her desire for fulfillment through it, fear lest it pass her by or find her unprepared, humility at its coming—this became the theme of the second volume of verse. To express it, Sara Teasdale was perfecting her technique, the writing of direct simple lyrics in clear-cut quatrains of simple meters. However deeply felt the matter, the manner was restrained and so the more effective. Typical of this method, a simplicity of form and of statement that implies much more than is openly said, is the completely characteristic poem, “The Song for Colin”:

I sang a song at dusking time
          Beneath the evening star,
And Terence left his latest rhyme
          To answer from afar.
Pierrot laid down his lute to weep,
          And sighed, “She sings for me,”
But Colin slept a careless sleep
          Beneath an apple tree.

The summer of 1912 the poet spent in Italy and Switzerland. In Italy, in particular, she found inspiration for a group of poems which, as “Vignettes Overseas,” appeared in her next volume. Except for this European trip and for two or three winters spent in New York, she lived with her parents in St. Louis until her marriage in 1914 to Ernst B. Filsinger, an importer and authority on international trade. Shortly her husband's business carried the couple to New York. For a while they were whole-heartedly happy together; but soon they found their lives diverging. Their separate interests, needs, and temperaments made different demands. Her increasingly poor health made her more and more of a recluse; his business necessitated frequent absences in Europe. Finally, in September 1929, they were divorced. The woman for whom love meant so much, for whom it gave meaning and direction to life, was able to relinquish it sharply and clearly.

In 1915, another volume of poems, Rivers to the Sea, was published. From that time on, the poet's external life was uneventful, marked only by her travels, in England in 1923 and in France in 1924, and by the publication of her various books. Of these two were anthologies: The Answering Voice and Rainbow Gold, the latter a collection of poems for children which included her own childhood favorite, the Rossetti poem. Her other books were all volumes of poetry. The publication in 1917 of Love Songs brought her great recognition, popularity with the public, and the acclaim of critics. Harriet Monroe in her magazine Poetry said of it that it “contains a few poems which may be ranked among the finest woman's love songs in the language, and the whole book reveals with singular clarity and precision a beautiful bright spirit of rare vividness and charm.” A committee composed of William Marion Reedy, Bliss Perry, and Jessie B. Rittenhouse chose it for the prize presented by Columbia University for the “best book of poetry published last year in the country by a citizen of the United States.” It won for its author a second prize, this from The Poetry Society of America. The three following books, Flame and Shadow in 1920, Dark of the Moon, 1926, and the posthumous Strange Victory, 1933, served only to strengthen the now firmly established reputation of the poet.

Was it possible that the desire to be a poet was born when the little girl first learned to love Christina Rossetti's “Christmas Carol”? At all events she became intensely interested in its author and planned to write a biography of that earlier woman poet. In June 1932, she went to London to undertake some research for the contemplated book. There she was stricken with pneumonia. Greatly weakened, she returned to New York and suffered a nervous breakdown. On the morning of January 29, 1933, she was found dead.

The unswerving devotion to poetry that marked her life she projected beyond death. Her last wishes, as recorded in her will, were concerned with poetry. She directed that after the death of her former husband and of a friend, her residuary estate be given to Wellesley College to provide an annual award for poetic achievement to an American who has had published at least one volume of verse. Jealous pride in her own work dictated her request that no previously unpublished poem of hers be published “unless written sanction for such publication appear thereon.”

One further wish she did express. As a young woman, confronted with the thought of eventual fate, she had written:

How can they leave me in that dark alone,
Who loved the joys of light and warmth so much,
And thrilled so with the sense of sound and touch—
How can they shut me underneath a stone?

As though to avoid that final shutting in, she asked that her body be cremated. Her final wish was granted and her ashes were buried in the family cemetery plot in St. Louis.

The gentle woman with the oval face, the red-gold hair parted in the middle, wide-set eyes and large sensitive mouth, was no more. The quiet voice that frequently startled with bright unexpected flashes of wit was forever stilled. The reticence which Sara Teasdale chose as her prerogative was complete.

Once, indeed, the poet broke her usual public silence to explain her theory of poetry and its creation. To Marguerite Wilkinson's New Voices, she contributed a brief article on “How Poems Are Made.” Poetry, she insisted, is the result of emotions produced by experience, either real or imaginary, and is written so that the poet may be relieved of his emotional burden. “Out of the fog of emotional restlessness from which a poem springs,” she wrote, “the basic idea emerges sometimes slowly, sometimes in a flash. This idea is known at once to be the light toward which the poet was groping. He now walks round and round it, 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 comes floating toward him with a charming definiteness of color and music. In my own case the rhythm of a poem usually follows, in a general way, the rhythm of the first line. The form of the poem should be a clear window-pane through which you see the poet's heart. The form, as form, should be engrossing neither to the poet nor to the reader. The reader should be barely conscious of the form, the rhymes or the rhythm. He should be conscious of emotions given him, and unconscious of the medium by which they are transmitted.” To achieve this end, she urged simplicity of diction and expression lest verbal tricks and complicated mannerisms distract the reader from the emotional content of the poem. “The poet should try to give his poem the quiet swiftness of flame, so that the reader will feel and not think while he is reading. But the thinking will come afterwards.”

A brief record is this, and a fragmentary one, of a poet's life and personality. For the rest, for the thoughts, and feelings, the moods, the longings, and the desires that made the woman and poet, one must look to the poems, themselves.

The poems are those of a thoughtful woman, not of one yielding herself to an abandon of emotions. But however aware one is of the mind behind the poems, one realizes that the initial poetic impulse is always in the feelings, not in thought.

For my mind is proud and strong enough to be silent,
          It is my heart that makes my songs, not I.

And the feelings are, for the most part, grounded in her own personal, intimate experiences rather than in her contacts with an external world of beauty or of confusion.

Occasionally there are songs of places, of New York, and of foreign cities, as in the “Vignettes Overseas” in Rivers to the Sea. A poem like “Dawn” paints the picture of a worn, sleeping city, in which “dreams wear thin” and men tossing upon their beds “hear the milkcart jangle by alone.” Or the mood of a place may be caught, as in the vivid reconstruction of winter-bound, deserted Coney Island:

With foams of icy lace
The sea creeps up the sand,
The wind is like a hand
That strikes us in the face.
Doors that June set a-swing
Are bolted long ago;
We try them uselessly—
Alas, there cannot be
For us a second spring.
          Come, let us go.

But the changing scene, American or European, city, countryside, or ocean, assumes importance chiefly as a shifting background for her feelings. Gibraltar is for her a “delicate despair”; Stresa fills her heart with beauty until “it can hold no more”; the Metropolitan Museum in New York City evokes the glories of the past

                                        till you stooped
To find the present with a kiss.

Not only are the physical characteristics of the outer world of little significance to her, but there is revealed in her poetry scarcely any concern with the world of people, with a social system rightly or wrongly developed. It would have been impossible, of course, for her to have completely escaped the influence of city-life, one of the manifestations of present-day civilization; and so there are poems of the city: “The Metropolitan Tower,” in her early book, Helen of Troy and Other Poems, “Broadway,” “May Day,” “In a Subway Station” in Rivers to the Sea, “A November Night” in Love Songs. There is a recognition that there are other men and women who live their lives, suffer or are glad. “From the Woolworth Tower” presents a tapestry of these human beings:

We feel the millions of humanity beneath us,—
The warm millions, moving under the roofs,
Consumed by their own desires;
Preparing food,
Sobbing alone in a garret,
With burning eyes bending over a needle,
Aimlessly reading the evening paper,
Dancing in the naked light of the café,
Laying out the dead,
Bringing a child to birth—
The sorrow, the torpor, the bitterness, the frail joy
Come up to us
Like a cold fog wrapping us round.

But the realization of their struggling existence rouses in her no indignation, no vehement protestation, no crying out against man's lot. There is scarcely even identification with those beneath her tower vantage point. For herself, the poet is concerned with the love that has come to her and set her triumphantly apart; the answer to the problem of what she sees before her is the exultant

Beloved,
Tho’ sorrow, futility, defeat
Surround us,
They cannot bear us down.
Here on the abyss of eternity
Love has crowned us
For a moment
Victor.

It was in the emotion of personal love that she felt her strongest link to other people. When others were happy in their love, she rejoiced with them; when they suffered grief through love, her heart went out to them. So for her the World War of 1914-1918, because it meant the breaking of tender ties, the cruel separation of loved ones, was a very real and devastating experience. She could understand the loss of love and her sympathy welled up for

                                        The woman over the sea
Waiting at dusk for one who is dead!

All the tenderness of her feelings pours forth in the poignant “Spring in War Time”:

Under the boughs where lovers walked
          The apple-blooms will shed their breath—
But what of all the lovers now
          Parted by death,
                                        Gray Death?

That is the province which Sara Teasdale chose for herself and her poetry, the realm of the intensely personal. Political, scientific, industrial changes may sweep and modify the world; but ever there is present for each individual his concern with the fundamentals of life—the identity of self, love, sorrow, death. This concern at its most personal—more specifically, her concern with these fundamentals—is the material of her poems. She professed to speak, not for the great mass of mankind, but only for herself. “Most poets,” she wrote, “find it easier to write about themselves than about anything else because they know more about themselves than about anything else.” Sara Teasdale wrote about herself; and because she wrote honestly and sincerely, she touches a responsive chord in all those who ever felt or thought as she did.

Above all others, love was the basic motif of her poetry. Very occasionally she treated it in a coquettish fashion. The oft-quoted poems, “The Song for Colin,” “The Look,” “Pierrot,” are typical of this mood. But the mood is not completely typical of the poet. Love had other, many other, sides; these were her subject. Delicately, with no false sense of shame, she poured out her feelings. Her viewpoint was essentially feminine; it is a woman's attitude that she expressed.

Like a growing, deepening theme, one can trace in the poems the development of a young woman's love. The first desires for some unknown fulfillment; the cry

Oh, beauty, are you not enough?
Why am I crying after love?

the fear lest life pass without love:

The air is blue and sweet,
          The few first stars are white,—
Oh let me like the birds
          Sing before night.

these are quieted by its coming. With its coming, the poet yields to a very ecstasy of emotion.

Now at last I can live!

she cries. All perplexities are resolved; vague questings, answered:

It is enough to feel his love
                    Blow by like music over me.

These lyrics are unquestionably the love songs of a woman. Love is an all-embracing passion, not simply a single manifestation of existence; to it the poet—the woman—grants complete submission:

I would beat with your heart as it beats, I would
                              follow your soul as it leads.

This desire for complete absorption by love may appear slightly crinolined to the young people of today who see in love, as in other emotions, an opportunity for reciprocal relations. Yet Sara Teasdale was modern in her viewpoint. For, in spite of this longing, in spite of her desire that it might be otherwise, she realized the actual, the essential loneliness of the soul in love who knows the utter impossibility, not only of a complete merging of lover and beloved, but even of a complete understanding:

I am alone, in spite of love,
                    In spite of all I take and give.

Indeed, she knew still more; she knew the “hard and precious stone” of truth, which she set forth so understandingly, so pointedly, in “Advice to a Young Girl”:

No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed.

It is the clear-eyed realization and acceptance not only of the joys and delights, but of all the various stresses and strains of love, the possibilities of change and of cessation that make Sara Teasdale's viewpoint a modern one. Her own sensitivity, her own experience, taught her that love may not endure in its original form:

Our love is dying like the grass;
          And we who kissed grow coldly kind,
Half glad to see our old love pass
          Like leaves along the wind.

Sometimes, too, one may continue to love where love is not returned. That is the theme of the very moving poem, “It Will Not Change.” Surmounting the vicissitudes of life, of death itself, the poet declares her love “will live on”; “in all my songs for you,” it will persist.

It would seem, indeed, as if the emotion itself were more important than the object of devotion. Love, of itself, despite the pain and sorrow it may bring, is to be embraced. If it is the cause of some of life's sorrows, it is as well the solvent of its problems. It is the key to life:

Only by love is life made real.

To beauty, too, it is the key. Color, movement, music—

The night thou badst Love fly away,
          He hid them all from thee.

One becomes aware, however, of a developing attitude toward beauty. Beauty becomes a thing apart, something to be pursued for its own sake, the epitome of the ideal. Again and again the note is repeated: beauty is the solace for grief; beauty is the weapon against mortality. Others may die, she says; but surely must there not be some “shining strange escape” for her

Who sought in Beauty the bright wine
          Of Immortality?

The search for beauty, the poet maintained, is the search that motivates the human race. Out of the past the message comes to her. As the result of change, of “mutation on mutation,” her “loving thoughts” spring from those who have gone before;

                                        I hear them cry, “Forever
Seek for Beauty, she only
Fights with man against Death!”

It was through her poetry that Sara Teasdale sought beauty. Sorrow and pain—for joy sings itself—she was able to transform into song; they became the material out of which beauty sprang and brought comfort. The “spirit's gray defeat,” physical weakness, lost hopes—over all of these, she could rise superior:

For with my singing, I can make
A refuge for my spirit's sake.

The clue to that indomitable power lies in the last line of that most beautiful poem, “On the Sussex Downs”:

It was myself that sang in me.

Song, the power to feel and to express poetry, was the very essence of Sara Teasdale's being; and it was to that being, to her own sense of identity, to the individual she felt herself to be, that she clung. In herself she found her own refuge, her comfort, and her strength.

Nature gave her no lasting comfort. Its beauty brought her joy, it is true, and an enrichment of self. But Nature, she realized, is completely heedless of the individual; its concern is only with the race, with vast forces. What matters it to Nature that one human being suffers?

Earth takes her children's many sorrows calmly
          And stills herself to sleep.

What would it matter, indeed, should all mankind not simply suffer, but be wiped out?

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Nature is supremely indifferent; it withdraws from—rather, it is completely unaware of—the cares of mankind.

One's only importance is to one's self. This is the realization which Sara Teasdale reached through her life's experience. Love came and departed; something remained. Nature smiled but withdrew, cold and aloof; something persisted. That something is one's sense of self, one's will to be and to do. Again and again the call to self-reliance, to self-dependence, to self-sufficiency is cried; clearer and clearer it sounds with the passing of the years. An entire section of Flame and Shadow, for example, is called “Songs for Myself.” These are poems, not of egotism or of narcissistic indulgence, but of strength and of courage. Again, in Dark of the Moon, the same note is struck. “The Solitary” declares that she, who is now “self-complete as a flower or a stone,” has little need of others. “Day's Ending” in the same volume repeats that self, not love, is the key to life:

“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.”

Finally, in Strange Victory, her last volume, the summation of her life and growth is expressed in the sonnet “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.

One must not imagine that this attitude of maturity was a contradiction of the views of youth. It was a development and a growth, not a denial. If love was not the end-all and be-all youth thought it to be, it was, nevertheless, to be accepted—nay sought—joyously and freely. If life brought sorrow, it was still to be lived eagerly, fully.

“I found more joy in sorrow
Than you could find in joy.”

Whatever life had to offer, that must be experienced and incorporated into one's very being. That made for an enriching and ennobling of self:

How can I quarrel with fate
          Since I can see
I am a debtor to life
          Not life to me?

And what was the poet's ultimate reaction to this life? She had experienced its bitter and its sweet, its pain and joy, its sorrow and its happiness. Out of the experience, deep if not broad, she was able to say sincerely, with conviction:

And on the whole, I think life good.

This attitude of unwavering acceptance is not the simple faith of our fathers, of those who found in some force outside themselves—in God, in Nature, in Law—the eternal and unchanging to which they could give their full loyalty. It is a modern attitude, cognizant of change and impermanence but undaunted by them. It faced and accepted the implications of mortal, changing love. So, in the poet's later life, it met the challenge of the impermanent physical; and realizing all that is meant by illness, by loss of physical strength, and by the inevitable, steady approach of death, still acknowledged reality and was not crushed.

Throughout the poet's later books there is made evident her preoccupation with change. There are yearning cries for youth that is no more. There is a wistful desire for joys and beauties that are past. There is regret for the inability to feel again the raptures that once she knew. But, in the face of change, in the realization that

The rest of the way will be only going down,

there is present a strong determination to live the latter days beautifully:

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.

The poet's growing concern with death, the ultimate change, is marked by a developing attitude. The early reaction is fear, but one most closely associated with the fear of missing the beauties of earth:

I am alone, the old terror takes me,
                              Evenings will come like this when I am gone.

Such hopes that a belief in immortality holds out are vague and tenuous besides the known certainty of the losses death inevitably brings. It is no orthodox immortality that is suggested by two poems, “If Death is Kind” and “On the Dunes”; if there be a life after death, these poems say, then there may be some return of the dead to the places they loved in life.

But suppose there be no immortality? The poet does not even profess to give an answer. Her first angry rebellion at the idea of death, however, yields in time to acquiescence and acceptance until, indeed, death is declared a friend “save when he comes too late.” She reaches a final triumph of spirit; she is able to welcome death while still glorying in life:

You only knew me, tell them I was glad
          For every hour since my hour of birth,
And that I ceased to fear, as once I feared,
          The last complete reunion with the earth.

There can be no question that this is a modern attitude. Reality is unflinchingly faced. Life is not wholly sweet; nor is death. One cannot blithely reject the one for the other. Nor can one cling to a compromise in the form of a wished-for immortality. Whatever comes must be accepted, and accepted bravely. Meanwhile, there is the ever present insistence upon the self. Unless one learns, the poet says, to ask no help, to bear grief courageously, and to enjoy pleasure fearlessly,

Unless I learn these things on earth,
Why was I ever given birth?

Except for a scattering handful of poems, there is no suggestion of the debonair or of the flippant in the exposition of the poet's views. Nor is there any of the cynicism that was the mark of many of her contemporaries. What she felt she felt deeply and expressed sincerely. She resorted to no subterfuge, no assumption of one mood to conceal another. While there is no concealment of innermost feelings, the reader who shares the poet's intimacies does not feel that he has been forced to violate any sense of privacy. He is saved from that embarrassment by a delicate reticence and restraint that are characteristic of her poetry.

You thought to see me cry, but oh
          My tears were hidden in my heart.

Emotions are vivid; but there are few details of description or of exposition. That very absence serves only to intensify the feelings. No one has known another's heartbreak, the poet says in “Snowfall” so she cannot answer directly the question whether some other woman is unhappy. But “she seems hushed to me,” the poet continues. And by the use of that word hushed, she draws a complete picture of a woman subdued by a quietly borne unhappiness. By that same word she suggests her own life and poems.

This temperamental restraint manifested itself in a similar restraint of poetic manner, an extreme simplicity of method. The elaboration, the highly wrought imagery and diction of her first two books, the poet quickly abandoned for a compressed simple medium, similar to that of Housman. “Twilight,” “The Long Hill,” for example, and, very particularly, “The Look” suggest the manner of A Shropshire Lad. This telling economy of method is at its best in such a poem as “Sand Drift,” with its unadorned but starkly beautiful last stanza:

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.

The danger inherent in such simplicity is the temptation to write the easy and the obvious. There results an occasional utterly trivial poem, like “The Return.” Rarely—but most rarely—the ease degenerates into a poem like “February Twilight” wherein one objects not so much to the manner as to the simplicity of idea, a vagueness of thought and meaning.

But, properly used, this method is the poet's strength. The highest art lies, possibly, in the concealment of art. So the care and effort required for the production of such unaffected poems are not apparent; the reader is aware only of their unadorned worthiness. In their ease and flow, the poems are essentially musical, lyric, lending themselves to singing.

Sara Teasdale molded to her lyric use a variety of meters. She experimented with free verse, using it in such poems as “From the Woolworth Tower,” “When I am Not With You,” “The Lighted Window”:

In the winter dusk
When the pavements were gleaming in the rain,
I walked through a dingy street
Hurried, harassed,
Thinking of all my problems that never are solved.

But by far the largest number of her poems are written in some more highly formalized rhythm. These are, however, all marked by the singing flow of her words. Even the blank verse of her very earliest poems, as has been noted, bears this lyric quality. The same is true of the sonnet, which was the form used in her first book of poems and used, again, so unerringly in her last volume, in “Ashes” and in “Return to a Country House.” Still another verse form that she made her own is the one called the Sapphic stanza. It is the form in which has come down the one fragment of poetry of the early Greek Sappho, who was, it will be remembered, one of Sara Teasdale's girlhood heroines. Surely nothing could be more lovely, more tender, than her poem in this meter, “The Lamp”:

If I can bear your love like a lamp before me,
When I go down the long steep Road of Darkness,
I shall not fear the everlasting shadows,
          Nor cry in terror.
If I can find out God, then I shall find Him,
If none can find Him, then I shall sleep soundly,
Knowing how well on earth your love sufficed me,
          A lamp in darkness.

But the more usual form in which her poems are cast is the quatrain, iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter, with the second and fourth lines rhyming. There are, of course, numerous variations within that form; for beauty and strength, lines are lengthened or shortened, stresses are shifted. Consider, for example, the effect of the shifted stress in the word warm in the lines:

My room is like a bit of June,
          Warm and close-curtained fold on fold.

or that on sank in the stanza:

The stately tragedy of dusk
          Drew to its perfect close,
The original white evening star
          Sank, and the red moon rose.

While this familiar ballad stanza is the one most frequently used, it is noticeable that with increasing maturity and increasing concern with more somber subjects, the poet came to employ a longer and slower meter. For four and three stress lines are substituted five and six stress ones; “At Tintagel,” in Dark of the Moon, to cite one instance, a hexameter alternates with a pentameter in a four-line stanza. So, too, instead of the short iambic foot, the longer dactyl or anapest is used, as in “August Night” in the same volume. The effect of subdued seriousness created by this use of a more slowly timed measure is illustrated by these lines:

But if you remember, then turn away forever
          To the plains and the prairies where pools are far
                    apart,
There you will not come at dusk on closing water
                    lilies,
          And the shadow of mountains will not fall on your
                    heart.

Something quite different, defying all fixed rules of meter analysis, is the poem, “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.

Under the dexterity that introduced such metrical variations lay the firm certainty of control over the simple meters. It is this simplicity of verse form of which the reader is first aware. Then it is apparent that this is combined with fundamental simplicity of word and of expression. A slight tendency toward gaudiness which was suggested in the first tentative volumes was quickly overcome. The early habit of personification, which starred Sonnets to Duse with capital letters, was soon abandoned. So, too, was the rather distressing habit of over-identification with nature. “I am the pool!”, “I am the still rain falling,” “I am a river,” “I am a cloud,” and other similar expressions followed each other in such rapid succession that the protean changes were breathtaking and ineffective! But once these habits were discarded—and they were rapidly outgrown—the poet wrote with a sure and compelling manner.

Throughout the poems there is evidence of the knowledge of words and feeling for their value that produce vivid, inevitable pictures. “Nimble sandpipers run twinkling by.” Sounds are “shimmering”; shadows, “naked.” Things are forgotten as a “hushed footfall” in a “long forgotten snow.” Simple figures of speech add their beauty. Softness, warmth, and drowsiness are suggested by a “quilt of snow.” Or, again, she writes:

                                        Even the lights are cold;
They have put shawls of fog around them, see!

or again:

But all my life was like an autumn day,
          Full of gray quiet and a happy peace.

Sometimes, indeed, a figure is expanded and used throughout an entire poem. In “Deep in the Night,” for example, in such a sustained figure, love is compared to a swallow crying in the night; in “Tides,” it is similarly compared to the incoming and outgoing tides. In several poems, in which a figure is used throughout, the meaning is never definitely stated, merely implied; but it is none the less impressive. Indeed it is all the more so because it is only suggested. An illustration of this method is “The Long Hill” in which life is implicitly compared to a walk up a hill—and down; and in which all the weariness—and relief, too—of old age are movingly suggested by the last line:

The rest of the way will be only going down.

If Sara Teasdale knew when to use a figure of speech, she knew equally well when not to use one. Consider, for example, this stanza from the poem “November”:

The world is tired, the year is old,
          The fading leaves are glad to die,
The wind goes shivering with cold
          Where the brown reeds are dry.

How very effective that last unadorned line is simply because it follows three lines which do contain figures of speech! A poem like “After Death,” completely without figurative or “poetical” language, is movingly satisfying. “I Have Seen the Spring” contains two slight figures; for the rest, it is the choice of details and the suffusion of feeling that make it memorable.

That is, indeed, the secret of Sara Teasdale's poetry. It is marked by force of feeling rather than by obvious technical showmanship. Figures that are used are never extravagant or strained. Suggestive of associations within the reader's own experience, they are easy to accept. They never become highly intellectualized, cleverly elaborated “conceits.”

One intellectual play, however, the poet does permit herself—a building up of suspense until the last stanza or, more frequently, last line; or a sudden twist of idea in the last line that produces a surprising contrast in mood or thought to that for which the preceding lines have prepared. “Buried Love,” as an illustration, proclaims the carefree attitude of one who has seen love depart, but ends

I shall stay all day in the sun
          Where the wide winds blow,—
But oh, I shall cry at night
          When none will know.

“Pierrot,” in lighter mood, shows the same technique in sharper, still more incisive fashion.

It is quite evident that there is little of the intellectualized in Sara Teasdale's poetry. It is poetry of sentiment, of feeling. Its mood, if one can generalize, is that of “gentle despair.” The early poems are filled with twilight, April rains, November nights, tender melancholy. In the later poems there is a steadily increasing sense of the passing of things. Life and earth are beautiful, she insists; regret that things change is only natural. But in her regret she is sustained by pride of mind. Behind her feelings, the mind, seeing and directing, creates poetry that is emotionally honest and strong.

She makes no discoveries, yields no new revelations. She seems, indeed, unaware of much in the world about her, the complexity of civilization, its wrongs, the discontent of people. But within the sphere that she has chosen, she does give a modern answer to timeless feelings and questionings. The beauties of life and of nature, the beauty of love and the pain of love lost, sorrow at the transitoriness of all things, courage in the face of death—these are her province; and the feelings aroused by their contemplation she expresses honestly and sincerely, as a woman faithful to her own emotions and convictions. Because of her honesty and strength, she gives authority to emotions generally felt. Each one must make his adjustment to life, to love, and to death; this is the goal of human seeking. Sara Teasdale made her adjustment. She loved life whole-heartedly; calmly and bravely she accepted the phenomenon of death. The attainment of her own “inviolate quest” she declares in her last poem:

“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.”

“There Will be Rest”

Horace Gregory (excerpt date 1942)

[In the following excerpt, Gregory places Teasdale's work within a literary context.]

Within three and four years after the birth of Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) two other poets were born in that most southern of Middle Western cities, St. Louis, Missouri, two poets whose work was so dissimilar to hers that their names can be mentioned only by way of contrast to everything she wrote. These two were Marianne Moore in 1887 and Thomas Stearns Eliot in 1888, and though between their work and Sara Teasdale's there seems more than a generation of advance in technic, subject matter, scope, and reputation, it is sometimes well to recollect that their dates of birth were within a single, and now memorable, half-decade. Though Sara Teasdale seemed always to have been a little old for her age, she also retained some of the instinctive, childlike wisdom and immaturity of those grown old too soon. One thinks of her as one of the “singers” who might well have lightened Clarence Stedman's “twilight interval” with a note of fresh, authentic “song.” Like Lizette Reese, Sara Teasdale created the illusion of being born a poet or, as Virginia Woolf once wrote of Christina Rossetti, an “instinctive.”

And indeed the likeness of her verse to Christina Rossetti's has more than a casual association; the direct influence of Christina Rossetti's verse may be traced throughout the poems of Sara Teasdale, and it is of no small significance that she was at work on a study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's remarkable sister when she died in 1933. She had the same fine ear (though not with the complete subtlety of transmitting a gentle and faintly exotic music, so characteristic of Christina Rossetti's verse) and the same gift of expressing intense emotion in a quiet voice. But where Christina Rossetti's theme had been the transfiguration and sublimation of love into religious devotion, Sara Teasdale's verse substituted the experiences and emotions of feminine love for religion itself. The very charm of Christina Rossetti's poetry is the image it conveys of a temperament that suppressed the raptures of a St. Theresa within the well-bred restraints and conventions of a nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic church. Within this subtle conflict lies the secret of Christina Rossetti's power, for in many ways she betrayed her un-English origins, and in none so poignantly as when she half disclosed her Latin temperament in the authentic voice of mystical devotion and piety. But if Sara Teasdale's earliest ideal of love and its devotion was in the image of Sappho, it was scarcely a Greek poetess at close view—and certainly not the Sappho of the French naturalists, nor the naughty poems of the 1890's.

The Sappho whom Sara Teasdale idealized, and with whom she had early identified her own poetic personality, was one of those figures who might have stepped from the chisel of William Wetmore Story, the American sculptor of the mid-nineteenth century, who after a long stay in Italy and after long contemplation of classic nudes, invested each of his mythological figures with an unmistakable air of New England chastity.

Sara Teasdale was the youngest child of middle-aged parents who seemed to have treated her with doting affection. “Anything that I wanted that my parents could get, came to me,” she said, and this surfeit of uncritical devotion from her elders may partially explain her lifelong preoccupation with herself, her own health, her conscious “inner” life, her perpetual invalidism. Her family were well off and took pleasure in encouraging the tastes, desires, education, hopes, and fancies of a frail and talented girl. Before her first book, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems, appeared in 1907, she had traveled widely, and she followed the course of a journey eastward as far as the European continent. Of her first book, Morton Dauwen Zabel wrote, “Sara Teasdale's early work made no pretense of being anything but the literary devotions of a talented girl whose spiritual refinement and good taste were enough to excuse the loose diction and conventional epithets with which she clothed her tributes to Duse, Guenevere, Beatrice, Sappho.”

Although Sara Teasdale's lyricism from its earliest appearance in a book always created the impression of spontaneous and liquid movement, as though each poem had been improvised for the occasion of reciting it in a gentle, intimate, almost whispering voice, its artistry was of slow and erratic development. Her first four volumes, including Love Songs, published in 1917, showed increasing promise, but relatively small achievement. One suspects that she was the kind of poet whose critical processes (in respect to her own work) flowed on unchecked and unheeded far below the surfaces of her conscious artistry. The proof that they existed may be shown in the distinction of her later poetry as well as in her lack of confidence in completing her study of Christina Rossetti. In Sara Teasdale's case one should not hesitate to point out the obvious fact that her relationship to her work and its progress was intuitive; and one should not be afraid to say that she wrote and published the same poem many times, changing its title and shifting its musical phrasing into a number of pleasing varieties, until at last a final poem appeared which contained the best qualities of a dozen or a score of poems preceding it. Although such a method or process may have seemed prodigal, she remained so clearly within the range of her limitations and her low-pitched variations upon a few well-chosen themes were so persuasive, that one seldom questions her sensitivity or her wisdom in following out the spiral course that she pursued. Even at her third and second best, one notes the progress that she made between a first collection of Love Songs in 1911 and her most frequently quoted poem, “The Look,” which was included in her 1915 volume, Rivers to the Sea. Among a group of earlier Love Songs, we find this urgent demand for immediate and unreserved affection:

Brown-thrush singing all day long
          In the leaves above me,
Take my love this April song,
          “Love me, love me, love me!”
When he harkens what you say,
          Bid him, lest he miss me,
Leave his work or leave his play,
          And kiss me, kiss me, kiss me!(1)

Today these earlier verses stand in contrast to the best and excellently tempered work of her later volumes, and however absurd her early confessions may seem to us today, they were forerunners of a flood of female self-revelations in which Edna St. Vincent Millay, during the 1920's, rode the crest of the wave, revelations in which no details of a love affair were spared the public, and whole schools of women poets announced proudly that they were with child. From these later movements, Sara Teasdale kept herself aloof. And she often indulged herself in the heresy of saying that she wrote to please herself, with the result that she has pleased more readers than many poets who had larger impulses in writing poetry as well as the hopes of being heard by ever-increasing audiences. “To raise esteem, we must benefit others; to procure love, we must please them,” wrote Samuel Johnson in one of his Rambler papers. Though Sara Teasdale's object was not to benefit the human race, yet by pleasing herself, she usually managed to please others.

Within her Rivers to the Sea, as well as in the five volumes of verse that followed it, one can trace the gradual deepening of her music. Slowly a tone of gravity and dignity possessed it, and as her music assumed deeper qualities, images of descending dark, and autumnal sadness, and of grave and piercing self-knowledge enter a portrait that previously contained the single image of a willful young woman who had been inspired by the need to love and to be loved.

One by one, like leaves from a tree,
All my faiths have forsaken me.
.....I have lost the leaves that knew
Touch of rain and weight of dew.(2)

A life, such as hers, devoted to an unceasing analysis of highly sensitized personal emotion, is always guaranteed to cause eventual restlessness in an intelligent woman, and Sara Teasdale's letters, however briefly quoted in Louis Untermeyer's From Another World, disclosed certain active perceptions, intuitions, and flashes of common sense that indicated the critical processes at work below the smoothly rippling surfaces of her poetry. One of the attractive features of her verse was its peculiarly classical quality, a quality that permeates her best work and is a corrective to the sentimental exuberances of “The Look” and the bathetic simplicities of “Love Me” and “The Song for Colin.” If her classicism never lost its relationship to the New England chastities of William Wetmore Story, her later poems were distinguished by their purity of diction, movement, and image—and in this interpretation of the classical spirit and its restraint we find the secret of Sara Teasdale's most subtle if not most popular charm. The first glimpse of her most enduring quality came to light in 1915.

The fountain shivers lightly in the rain,
          The laurels drip, the fading roses fall,
The marble satyr plays a mournful strain
          That leaves the rainy fragrance musical.
Oh dripping laurel, Phoebus sacred tree,
          Would that swift Daphne's lot might come to
me,
Then would I still my soul and for an hour
          Change to a laurel in the glancing shower.

“Villa Serbelloni, Bellaggio”³

The solid facts of her biography bear a tenuous, almost unreal relationship to her poetry. In 1914 she married Ernst Filsinger, a heavy-shouldered, prosperous businessman, whose weighty and protective interest in literature included a vague and yet tender admiration for the fantasies of Walter de la Mare. Sara Teasdale herself was a tall, plain-featured woman, angular and pale; at first glance she seemed the very image of the middle-aged, overworked, conscientious, maidenly schoolmistress who still exists in the imagination of the American public. This illusion was soon dispelled by the extraordinary animation of her voice and the clear, brilliant light that seemed reflected from her pince-nez. After twelve years of marriage, she decided to live alone in a New York apartment where she limited the large circle of her acquaintances to a few friends. It was two years before this decision that her best volume of verse, Dark of the Moon, appeared. From then onward to 1933 there was scarcely a poem which she published that did not possess its own unpretentious charm; she had become the mistress of a style whose simplicity was not without a touch of austere elegance. Intimations of this latter refinement of an elegiac style, with its melancholy undertones and graceful turn of phrase, had made a tentative arrival as early as 1920 in her Flame and Shadow, and its beginnings may be traced through

Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
          Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold …
.....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.(4)

The personality she had created in her poems felt that the times as well as her individual character were less youthful and less assured of an affirmative answer to her question

After the stillness, will spring come again?

She had already written:

I must have passed the crest a while ago
          And now I am going down—
Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know,
          But the brambles were always catching the hem of
my gown.
.....It was nearly level along the beaten track
          And the brambles caught in my gown—
But it’s no use now to think of turning back,
          The rest of the way will be only going down.(5)

Autumn had become her season and in “Arcturus in Autumn,”⁶ she wrote what might well be read as her valediction:

When, in the gold October dusk, I saw you near to setting,
          Arcturus, bringer of spring,
Lord of the summer nights, leaving us now in autumn,
          Having no pity on our withering;
Oh then I knew at last that my own autumn was upon me,
          I felt it in my blood,
Restless as dwindling streams that still remember
          The music of their flood.
There in the thickening dark a wind-bent tree above me
          Loosed its last leaves in flight—
I saw you sink and vanish, pitiless Arcturus,
          You will not stay to share our lengthening night.

The four “autumn” poems written in France in 1923 are more than sufficient evidence of the final artistry her verse achieved. “Autumn (Parc Monceau)” brings to mind the formal graces of André Chénier, and indeed the poem seems to celebrate the memory of late eighteenth-century classicism that contained within its courtly, if not wholly urban, pastorals the early seeds of Continental romanticism. The poem has a purity of form and a technical brilliance that is equaled only by her “Fontainebleau,” for here one rediscovers a quality in Sara Teasdale's art that is all too seldom stressed in the customary revaluations of her poetry:

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 autumn, four centuries of leaves.(7)

In 1933 Sara Teasdale's death was caused by an overdose of sleeping tablets, and during that year, her last book of lyrics, Strange Victory, was posthumously published. These include the title poem and “In a Darkening Garden” in which the clear imagery and deepening melancholy music seem now to have foretold her end:

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 …(8)

Her large volume of Collected Poems which was published in 1937, was a book that contained over three hundred poems. If the book had been reduced to a selection of fifty titles and edited with the intelligence that had gone into George Santayana's 1922 edition of his Poems, Sara Teasdale's reputation would stand much higher in critical esteem than it does today.

During the years of the “poetic renaissance” which followed the publication of her first book, and the succeeding 1920's, Sara Teasdale's verse retained its associations with an earlier period in American poetry. Throughout its progress one discerns a last look backward into Stedman's “twilight interval.” But if it anticipated a later school of which Edna St. Vincent Millay became the acknowledged mistress, its sensibilities also reached beyond the 1920's toward a revival of the elegiac tradition in Anglo-American verse. Not unlike the best of George Santayana's poetry, the best of Sara Teasdale's verses transcend the more facile definitions of belonging to a particular school; or to those distinctions which determine the sex of the author, or of being related to a particular nationality. It may be said that her verse had always been written in a distinctly minor key—but this definition does not modify its occasional excellence, nor the mature if muted notes of its later lyrical utterance.

The public response to Sara Teasdale's verse has always been phenomenal; her celebrity was quickly established by Love Songs in 1917, which was followed by public neglect during the ten years preceding her death in 1933. Five years later, and after the publication of her posthumous Collected Poems, public interest in her verse was rearoused; her book went through several editions in rapid order, and one concludes that her anonymous readers showed more discernment than the majority of her critics whose attention had been too closely held by the transitory excitements and diversions of “schools” and “movements” in American poetry.

Notes

1. “Love Me” from Collected Poems. By permission of The Macmillan Company.

2. “Leaves” from Collected Poems. By permission of The Macmillan Company.

3. “Vignettes Overseas, IX: Villa Serbelloni, Bellaggio” from Collected Poems. By permission of The Macmillan Company.

4. “Let It Be Forgotten” from Collected Poems. By permission of The Macmillan Company.

5. “The Long Hill” from Collected Poems. By permission of The Macmillan Company.

6. From Collected Poems. By permission of The Macmillan Company.

7. “Fontainebleau” from Collected Poems. By permission of The Macmillan Company.

8. “All That Was Mortal” from Collected Poems. By permission of The Macmillan Company.