Sara Teasdale
(1884-1933)
Contents
The Life and Poetry of Sara Teasdale
Brief Introduction: Sara Teasdale
Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems, 1907
Helen of Troy and Other Poems, 1911
Rivers to the Sea, 1915
Love Songs, 1917
Flame and Shadow, 1920
Dark of the Moon, 1926
Stars To-night, 1930
Strange Victory, 1933
The Poems
List of Poems in Chronological Order
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
The Delphi Classics Catalogue
© Delphi Classics 2018
Version 1
Sara Teasdale
By Delphi Classics, 2018
COPYRIGHT
Sara Teasdale - Delphi Poets Series
First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by Delphi Classics.
© Delphi Classics, 2018.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.
ISBN: 978 1 78656 220 3
Delphi Classics
is an imprint of
Delphi Publishing Ltd
Hastings, East Sussex
United Kingdom
Contact: [email protected]
www.delphiclassics.com
NOTE
When reading poetry on an eReader, it is advisable to use a small font size and landscape mode, which will allow the lines of poetry to display correctly.
The Life and Poetry of Sara Teasdale
St. Louis, Missouri — Teasdale’s birthplace
An illustrated map of St. Louis by F. Graf, 1896
The Government Building at the 1904 World’s Fair
Sara Teasdale as a young girl, c. 1890
Brief Introduction: Sara Teasdale
SARA TEASDALE was the eldest of three great poets that were born in St. Louis in the 1880’s, the other two being T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore. Teasdale suffered poor health for much of her childhood and so was home schooled until she was ten, when she was judged well enough to begin school. She started at St. Louis’ Mary Institute in 1898, but switched to Hosmer Hall in 1899, graduating in 1903. The Teasdale family resided first at 3668 Lindell Blvd. and then 38 Kingsbury Place in St. Louis, Missouri.
Greatly interested in poetry from an early age, Teasdale went on to become a member of The Potters, led by Lillie Rose Ernst, a group of female artists in their late teens and early twenties. This group published from 1904 to 1907 The Potter’s Wheel, a monthly artistic and literary magazine in St. Louis. In time, Teasdale’s first poem was published in Reedy’s Mirror, a local newspaper, in 1907. Her first collection of poems, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems, was published shortly after.
The collection featured twenty-nine poems, including twenty short lyrics, which the Poet Lore Company of Boston agreed to publish after her indulgent parents paid $290 for the printing of a thousand copies. She spent much time fretting over proofs during the summer at Charlevoix, and in early September an attractive little volume was ready. Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems was illustrated with three photographs of the dedicatee, Eleonora Duse (1858-1924), an Italian actress, often known simply as ‘Duse’. She was regarded as one of the greatest actresses of her time, noted for her total assumption of the roles she portrayed. Although Teasdale never saw Duse perform, her idealising imagination had constructed from current reviews a woman that embodied all her ideas of the perfect feminine artist of the beautiful.
Cheered by the excitement of being a real author at last, however small a figure she cut among her great idols, she generously mailed copies of the collection to her friends. From the beginning, she demonstrated a keen shrewdness in promoting her writing career. Never aggressively, but always with charm and gratitude, befitting a lady, but with unyielding persistence, she promoted her poetry. One copy went immediately to Arthur Symons (1865-1945), the British poet, critic and magazine editor. He wrote a brief notice that appeared in the Saturday Review on 5 October, praising the lyrics more than the sonnets. Teasdale’s career as a poet was launched.
Teasdale’s second collection, Helen of Troy and Other Poems, was published in 1911. The opening poems are formed as a series of blank verse monologues about the legendary destructive loves of famous women, each reflecting in a quiet moment on her tragic career. The first, “Guenevere,” was published in Reedy’s Mirror on 30 May 30 and was well received by critics, who praised its lyrical mastery and romantic subject matter.
From 1911 to 1914 Teasdale was courted by several men, including the poet Vachel Lindsay, who was truly in love with her, but felt he could not provide enough money or stability to keep her satisfied. In the end, she chose to marry Ernst Filsinger, a long-time admirer of her poetry, on 19 December 1914.
Teasdale’s third poetry collection, Rivers to the Sea, was published in 1915. It became a bestseller and was reprinted several times. In 1916 she and Filsinger moved to New York City, where they lived in an Upper West Side apartment on Central Park West.
In the fall of 1917, Teasdale published Love Songs, which proved to be her most popular single volume, going into a second printing only two months later. Readings from the collection before large audiences were scheduled at the New York Public Library and the National Arts Club. The following year she won a Pulitzer Prize for Love Songs, which was “made possible by a special grant from The Poetry Society”; however, the sponsoring organisation now lists Love Songs as the earliest Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (inaugurated 1922).
Filsinger’s constant business travel caused Teasdale much loneliness. In 1929, she moved interstate for three months, wishing to satisfy the criteria for a divorce. She did not wish to inform Filsinger, only doing so at her lawyers’ insistence as the divorce was going through. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband was duly shocked. After the divorce she moved only two blocks from her old home on Central Park West, where she rekindled her friendship with Vachel Lindsay, who was now married with children.
Her divorce was complete in 1929 and she lived for the rest of her life as a semi-invalid. In 1933, in frail health after a recent bout of pneumonia, she took her own life with an overdose of barbiturates. Her last and perhaps finest collection of verse, Strange Victory, was published later that year. Lindsay had died by suicide two years earlier. Teasdale is interred in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.
A common urban legend surrounds Teasdale’s suicide. The poem I Shall Not Care was speculated to be her suicide note due to its morbid undertone, concerning themes of abandonment, bitterness and the contemplation of death. The legend claims that the poem was penned as a suicide note to a former lover. However, I Shall Not Care was actually first published in the 1915 collection Rivers to the Sea, eighteen years prior to Teasdale’s suicide.
The poetry of Sara Teasdale is consistently classical in style. She wrote technically astute, pure and candid lyrics, often structured in conventional verse forms such as quatrains or sonnets, exploiting an increasing subtlety and economy of expression. Although critics found much of Teasdale’s poetry to be unsophisticated, they praised its musical language and evocative emotion. A New York Times Book Review contributor, reviewing the 1917 edition of Love Songs, asserted that “Miss Teasdale is first, last, and always a singer.” Another New York Times contributor, this time reviewing the 1915 collection Rivers to the Sea, declared the book “a little volume of joyous and unstudied song.”
Sara Teasdale, 1907
Arthur Symons in 1907
The American poet Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, 1913
Teasdale in 1914
Teasdale in later years
Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems, 1907
CONTENTS
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
The first edition’s title page
The original frontispiece: portrait of the actress Eleonora Duse
To my Father and Mother
To Duse
Oh beauty that is filled so full of tears,
Where every passing anguish left its trace,
I pray you grant to me this depth of grace:
That I may see before it disappears,
Blown through the gateway of our hopes and fears
To death’s insatiable last embrace,
The glory and the sadness of your face,
Its longing unappeased through all the years.
No bitterness beneath your sorrow clings;
Within the wild dark falling of your hair
There lies a strength that ever soars and sings;
Your mouth’s mute weariness is not despair.
Perhaps among us craven earth-born things
God loves its silence better than a prayer.
To Eleonora Duse
Your beauty lives in mystic melodies,
And all the light about you breathes a song.
Your voice awakes the dreaming airs that throng
Within our music-haunted memories:
The sirens’ strain that sank within the seas
When men forgot to listen, floats along
Your voice’s undercurrent soft and strong.
Sicilian shepherds pipe beneath the trees;
Along the purple hills of drifted sand,
A lone Egyptian plays an ancient flute;
At dawn the Memnon gives his old salute
Beside the Nile, by desert breezes fanned.
The music faints about you as you stand,
And with the Orphean lay it trembles mute.
To Eleonora Duse
To Eleonora Duse in “The Dead City”
Were you a Greek when all the world was young,
Before the weary years that pass and pass,
Had scattered all the temples on the grass,
Before the moss to marble columns clung?
I think your snowy tunic must have hung
As now your gown does — wave on wave a mass
Of woven water. As within a glass
I see your face when Homer’s tales were sung.
Alcaeus kissed your mouth and found it sweet,
And Sappho’s hand has lingered in your hand.
You half remember Lesbos as you stand
Where all the times and countries mix and meet,
And lay your weight of beauty at our feet,
A garland gathered in a distant land.
To a Picture of Eleonora Duse in “The Dead City
Your face is set against a fervent sky,
Before the thirsty hills that sevenfold
Return the sun’s hot glory, gold on gold,
Where Agamemnon and Cassandra lie.
Your eyes are blind whose light shall never die,
And all the tears the closèd eyelids hold,
And all the longing that the eyes have told,
Is gathered in the lips that make no cry.
Yea, like a flower within a desert place,
Whose petals fold and fade for lack of rain,
Are these, your eyes, where joy of sight was slain,
And in the silence of your lifted face,
The cloud is rent that hides a sleeping race,
And vanished Grecian beauty lives again.
To a Picture of Eleonora Duse in “The Dead City
Carved in the silence by the hand of Pain,
And made more perfect by the gift of Peace,
Than if Delight had bid your sorrow cease,
And brought the dawn to where the dark has lain,
And set a smile upon your lips again;
Oh strong and noble! Tho’ your woes increase,
The gods shall hear no crying for release,
Nor see the tremble that your lips restrain.
Alone as all the chosen are alone,
Yet one with all the beauty of the past;
A sister to the noblest that we know,
The Venus carved in Melos long ago,
Yea, speak to her, and at your lightest tone,
Her lips will part and words will come at last.
To a Picture of Eleonora Duse as “Francesca da Rimini”
Oh flower-sweet face and bended flower-like head!
Oh violet whose purple cannot pale,
Or forest fragrance ever faint or fail,
Or breath and beauty pass among the dead!
Yea, very truly has the poet said,
No mist of years or might of death avail
To darken beauty — brighter thro’ the veil
We see the glimmer of its wings outspread.
Oh face embowered and shadowed by thy hair,
Some lotus blossom on a darkened stream!
If ever I have pictured in a dream
My guardian angel, she is like to this,
Her eyes know joy, yet sorrow lingers there,
And on her lips the shadow of a kiss.
To a Picture of Eleonora Duse
Was ever any face like this before —
So light a veiling for the soul within,
So pure and yet so pitiful for sin?
They say the soul will pass the Heavy Door,
And yearning upward, learn creation’s lore —
The body buried ‘neath the earthly din.
But thine shall live forever, it hath been
So near the soul, and shall be evermore.
Oh eyes that see so far thro’ misted tears,
Oh Death, behold, these eyes can never die!
Yea, tho’ your kiss shall rob these lips of breath,
Their faint, sad smile will still elude thee, Death.
Behold the perfect flower this neck uprears,
And bow thy head and pass the wonder by.
To a Picture of Eleonora Duse with the Greek Fire in “Francesca da Rimini”
Francesca’s life that was a limpid flame
Agleam against the shimmer of a sword,
Which falling, quenched the flame in blood outpoured
To free the house of Rimino from shame —
Francesca’s death that blazed aloft her name
In guilty fadeless glory, hurling toward
The windy darkness where the tempest roared,
Her spirit burdened by the weight of blame —
Francesca’s life and death are mirrored here
Forever, on the face of her who stands
Illumined and intent beside the blaze,
Grown one
with it, and reading without fear
That they shall fare upon the selfsame ways,
Plucked forth and cast away by bloody hands.
A Song to Eleonora Duse in “Francesca da Rimini”
Oh would I were the roses, that lie against her hands,
The heavy burning roses she touches as she stands!
Dear hands that hold the roses, where mine would love to be,
Oh leave, oh leave the roses, and hold the hands of me!
She draws the heart from out them, she draws away their breath, —
Oh would that I might perish and find so sweet a death!
To Japanese Incense
The wind that rings the temple bell
Is far away,
And far the brazen incense urns
Of ashes grey.
And far the carven temple gates
Of red and gold —
The dreamy temples where the gods
Have long been old.
The dragonflies and irises
Beside the stream,
Are far away in lands of dawn
And lands of dream.
And here beneath an alien sky
Your breath ascends,
A column delicate and grey
That waves and bends,
And lifts a scent of sandal-wood,
Devoid of prayer,
To seek an ancient Eastern god
Thro’ Western air.
To Sappho, I
I
Impassioned singer of the happy time
When all the world was waking into morn,
Complete Works of Sara Teasdale Page 1