Like fireflies on a moist June night,
The planetoids among the planets
Played for their own delight.
I watched earth putting off her winter
And slipping into green;
I saw the dark side of the moon
No man has ever seen.
Like shining wheels in an opened watch
They all revolved with soundless motion;
Earth sparkled like a rain-wet flower,
Bearing her petals, plain and ocean.
WINTER NOON
Snow-dust driven over the snow
In glittering light,
Low hills, far as the eye can go,
White on white;
Blue as a blue jay, shadows run
Due north from every tree —
Chipmunk, do you like the sun,
The blowing snow and me?
Strange Victory, 1933
CONTENTS
MOON’S ENDING
WISDOM
AUTUMN ON THE BEACHES
ADVICE TO A GIRL
EVEN TO-DAY
TRUCE
STRANGE VICTORY
SECRET TREASURE
LAST PRELUDE
IN A DARKENING GARDEN
TO M.
ASHES
IN MEMORY OF VACHEL LINDSAY
GRACE BEFORE SLEEP
ALL THAT WAS MORTAL
TO THE SEA
RETURN TO A COUNTRY HOUSE
SINCE DEATH BRUSHED PAST ME
TO A CHILD WATCHING THE GULLS
LINES
THERE WILL BE REST
The first edition’s title page
MOON’S ENDING
Moon, worn thin to the width of a quill,
In the dawn clouds flying,
How good to go, light into light, and still
Giving light, dying.
WISDOM
Oh to relinquish, with no more of sound
Than the bent bough’s when the bright apples fall;
Oh to let go, without a cry or call
That can be heard by any above ground;
Let the dead know, but not the living see —
The dead who loved me will not suffer, knowing
It is all one, the coming or the going,
If I have kept the last, essential me.
If that is safe, then I am safe indeed,
It is my citadel, my church, my home,
My mother and my child, my constant friend;
It is my music, making for my need
A paean like the cymbals of the foam,
Or silence, level, spacious, without end.
AUTUMN ON THE BEACHES
Not more blue at the dawn of the world,
Not more virgin or more gay,
Never in all the million years
Was the sea happier than to-day.
The sand was not more trackless then,
Morning more stainless or more cold —
Only the forest and the fields
Know that the year is old.
ADVICE TO A GIRL
No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed;
Lay that on your heart,
My young angry dear;
This truth, this hard and precious stone,
Lay it on your hot cheek,
Let it hide your tear.
Hold it like a crystal
When you are alone
And gaze in the depths of the icy stone.
Long, look long and you will be blessed:
No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed.
AGE
Brooks sing in the spring
And in summer cease;
I who sang in my youth
Now hold my peace;
Youth is a noisy stream
Chattering over the ground,
But the sad wisdom of age
Wells up without sound.
EVEN TO-DAY
What if the bridge men built goes down,
What if the torrent sweeps the town,
The hills are safe, the hills remain,
And hills are happy in the rain;
If I can climb the hills and find
A small square cottage to my mind,
A lonely but a cleanly house
With shelves too bare to tempt a mouse,
Whatever years remain to me
I shall live out in dignity.
TRUCE
Take heart, for now the battle is half over,
We have not shamed our sires;
Pride, the lone pennon, ravelled by the storm-wind
Stands in the sunset fires.
It may be, with the coming-on of evening
We shall be granted unassailed repose,
And what is left of dusk will be less darkness
Than luminous air, on which the crescent glows.
STRANGE VICTORY
To this, to this, after my hope was lost,
To this strange victory;
To find you with the living, not the dead,
To find you glad of me;
To find you wounded even less than I,
Moving as I across the stricken plain;
After the battle to have found your voice
Lifted above the slain.
SECRET TREASURE
Fear not that my music seems
Like water locked in winter streams;
You are the sun that many a time
Thawed those rivers into rhyme,
But let them for a while remain
A hidden music in my brain.
Unmeaning phrase and wordless measure,
That unencumbered loveliness
Which is a poet’s secret treasure
Sings in me now, and sings no less
That even for your lenient eyes
It will not live in written guise.
LAST PRELUDE
If this shall be the last time
The melody flies upward
With its rush of sparks in flight,
Let me go up with it in fire and laughter,
Or let me drown if need be
Lost in the swirl of light.
The violins are tuning, whimpering, catching thunder
From the suppressed dark agony of viols —
Once more let heaven clutch me, plunge me under
Miles on uncounted miles.
IN A DARKENING GARDEN
Gather together, against the coming of night,
All that we played with here,
Toys and fruits, the quill from the sea-bird’s flight,
The small flute, hollow and clear;
The apple that was not eaten, the grapes untasted
Let them be put away.
They served for us, I would not have them wasted,
They lasted out our day.
TO M.
Till the last sleep, from the blind waking at birth,
Bearing the weight of the years between the two,
I shall find no better thing upon the earth
Than the wilful, noble, faulty thing which is you.
You have not failed me; but if you too should fail me,
Being human, bound on your own inviolate quest,
No matter now what the years do to assail me
I shall go, in some sort, a victor, down to my rest.
ASHES
Laid in a quiet corner of the world
There will be left no more of me some night
Than the lone bat could carry in his flight
Over the meadows when the moon is furled;
I shall be then so little, and so lost,
Only the many-fingered rain will find me,
And I have taken thought to leave behind me
Nothing to feel the long on-coming frost.
Now without sorrow and without elation
I can lay down my body, nor deplore
How little, with her insufficient ration,
Life has to feed us —
but these hands, must they
Go in the same blank, ignominious way,
And fold upon themselves, at last, no more?
IN MEMORY OF VACHEL LINDSAY
“Deep in the ages,” you said, “deep in the ages,”
And, “To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name.”
You are deep in the ages, now, deep in the ages,
You whom the world could not break, nor the years tame.
Fly out, fly on, eagle that is not forgotten,
Fly straight to the innermost light, you who loved sun in your eyes,
Free of the fret, free of the weight of living,
Bravest among the brave, gayest among the wise.
GRACE BEFORE SLEEP
How can our minds and bodies be
Grateful enough that we have spent
Here in this generous room, we three,
This evening of content?
Each one of us has walked through storm
And fled the wolves along the road;
But here the hearth is wide and warm,
And for this shelter and this light
Accept, O Lord, our thanks to-night.
ALL THAT WAS MORTAL
All that was mortal shall be burned away,
All that was mind shall have been put to sleep.
Only the spirit shall awake to say
What the deep says to the deep;
But for an instant, for it too is fleeting —
As on a field with new snow everywhere,
Footprints of birds record a brief alighting
In flight begun and ended in the air.
TO THE SEA
Bitter and beautiful, sing no more;
Scarf of spindrift strewn on the shore,
Burn no more in the noon-day light,
Let there be night for me, let there be night.
On the restless beaches I used to range
The two that I loved have walked with me —
I saw them change and my own heart change —
I cannot face the unchanging sea.
RETURN TO A COUNTRY HOUSE
Nothing but darkness enters in this room,
Nothing but darkness and the winter night,
Yet on this bed once years ago a light
Silvered the sheets with an unearthly bloom;
It was the planet Venus in the west
Casting a square of brightness on this bed,
And in that light your dark and lovely head
Lay for a while and seemed to be at rest.
But that the light is gone, and that no more
Even if it were here, would you be here, —
That is one line in a long tragic play
That has been acted many times before,
And acted best when not a single tear
Falls, — when the mind and not the heart holds sway.
SINCE DEATH BRUSHED PAST ME
Since Death brushed past me once more to-day,
Let me say quickly what I must say:
Take without shame the love I give you,
Take it before I am hurried away.
You are intrepid, noble, kind,
My heart goes to you with my mind,
The plummet of your thought is long
Sunk in deep water, cold with song.
You are all I asked, my dear —
My words are said, my way is clear.
TO A CHILD WATCHING THE GULLS
(Queenstown Harbor)
The painted light was on their underwings,
And on their firm curved breasts the painted light,
Sailing they swerved in the red air of sunset
With petulant cries unworthy of their flight;
But on their underwings that fleeting splendor,
Those chilly breasts an instant burning red —
You who are young, O you who will outlive me,
Remember them for the indifferent dead.
LINES
These are the ultimate highlands,
Like chord on chord of music
Climbing to rest
On the highest peak and the bluest
Large on the luminous heavens
Deep in the west.
THERE WILL BE REST
There will be rest, and sure stars shining
Over the roof-tops crowned with snow,
A reign of rest, serene forgetting,
The music of stillness holy and low.
I will make this world of my devising
Out of a dream in my lonely mind,
I shall find the crystal of peace, — above me
Stars I shall find.
The Poems
38 Kingsbury Place, St. Louis, Missouri – the poet’s home in her adolescent years. The house was designed by Teasdale’s mother, with a private suite for Sara on the second floor. Guests entered through a separate entrance and were admitted by appointment. This suite is where Sara worked, slept, and often dined alone.
List of Poems in Chronological Order
Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems, 1907
To Duse
To Eleonora Duse
To Eleonora Duse
To a Picture of Eleonora Duse in “The Dead City
To a Picture of Eleonora Duse in “The Dead City
To a Picture of Eleonora Duse as “Francesca da Rimini”
To a Picture of Eleonora Duse
To a Picture of Eleonora Duse with the Greek Fire in “Francesca da Rimini”
A Song to Eleonora Duse in “Francesca da Rimini”
To Japanese Incense
To Sappho, I
To Sappho, II
To L.R.E
The Meeting
The Gift
Dead Love
The Love that Goes A-begging
Song
Wishes
Dusk in Autumn
In David’s “Child’s Garden of Verses”
Triolets
Sonnet
Dream Song
To Joy
Roses and Rue
The Heart’s House
The House of Dreams
Faults
Helen of Troy and Other Poems, 1911
Helen of Troy
Beatrice
Sappho
Marianna Alcoforando
Guenevere
Erinna
Song
The Rose and the Bee
The Song Maker
Wild Asters
When Love Goes
The Wayfarer
The Princess in the Tower
When Love Was Born
The Shrine
The Blind
Love Me
The Song for Colin
Four Winds
Roundel
Dew
A Maiden
I Love You
But Not to Me
Hidden Love
Snow Song
Youth and the Pilgrim
The Wanderer
I Would Live in Your Love
May
Rispetto
Less than the Cloud to the Wind
Buried Love
Song
Pierrot
At Night
Song
Love in Autumn
The Kiss
November
A Song of the Princess
The Wind
A Winter Night
The Metropolitan Tower
Gramercy Park
In the Metropolitan Museum
Coney Island
Union Square
Central Park at Dusk
Young Love
Sonnets and Lyrics
Soul’s Birth
Love and Death
For the Anniversary of John Keats’ Death
Silence
The Return
Fear
Anadyomene
Galahad in the Castle of the Maidens
To an Aeolian Harp
To Erinna
To Cleis
Paris in Spring
Madeira from the Sea
City Vignettes
By the Sea
On the Death of Swinburne
Triolets
Vox Corporis
A Ballad of Two Knights
Christmas Carol
The Faery Forest
A Fantasy
A Minuet of Mozart’s
Twilight
The Prayer
Two Songs for a Child
Rivers to the Sea, 1915
SPRING NIGHT
THE FLIGHT
BUT WHAT IF I HEARD MY FIRST LOVE CALLING ME ONCE MORE?
NEW LOVE AND OLD
THE LOOK
SPRING
THE LIGHTED WINDOW
THE KISS
SWANS
THE OLD MAID
FROM THE WOOLWORTH TOWER
AT NIGHT
THE YEARS
PEACE
APRIL
COME
MOODS
APRIL SONG
MAY DAY
CROWNED
TO A CASTILIAN SONG
BROADWAY
A WINTER BLUEJAY
IN A RESTAURANT
JOY
IN A RAILROAD STATION
IN THE TRAIN
TO ONE AWAY
SONG
DEEP IN THE NIGHT
THE INDIA WHARF
I SHALL NOT CARE
DESERT POOLS
LONGING
PITY
AFTER PARTING
ENOUGH
ALCHEMY
FEBRUARY
MORNING
MAY NIGHT
DUSK IN JUNE
LOVE-FREE
SUMMER NIGHT, RIVERSIDE
IN A SUBWAY STATION
AFTER LOVE
DOORYARD ROSES
A PRAYER
INDIAN SUMMER
THE SEA WIND
THE CLOUD
THE POOR HOUSE
NEW YEAR’S DAWN — BROADWAY
THE STAR
DOCTORS
IN THE CARPENTER’S SHOP
THE CARPENTER’S SON
THE MOTHER OF A POET
RIVERS TO THE SEA
IN MEMORIAM F. O. S.
TWILIGHT
SWALLOW FLIGHT
THOUGHTS
TO DICK, ON HIS SIXTH BIRTHDAY
Complete Works of Sara Teasdale Page 20
