(August 8, 1884 – January 29, 1933) USA.
Sara was born to a fairly wealthy family who owned two houses, designed by her mother. She had poor health for most of her childhood. In her late twenties she was ‘courted’ by several men, one of whom was the poet Vachel Lindsey but he withdrew as he felt he had too little financial prospect. She married Ernst Filsinger in Dec. 1914.
Teasdale’s third poetry collection, Rivers to the Sea, published in 1915 was a bestseller, being reprinted several times.
In 1918 she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1917 for her poetry collection Love Songs. It was “made possible by a special grant from ‘The Poetry Society.’ The sponsoring organization now lists it as the earliest Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (inaugurated 1922).
The marriage failed, (To his surprise!) she moved homes when her husband was away for work and she divorced him in 1929. She became close to Vachel Lindsey again. Sara overdosed and died In January 1933.
She was a ‘lyrical’ poet and is very readable today.
All poems from the book Flame and Shadow
Gray Eyes
It was April when you came
The first time to me,
And my first look in your eyes
Was like my first look at the sea.
We have been together
Four Aprils now
Watching for the green
On the swaying willow bough;
Yet whenever I turn
To your gray eyes over me,
t is as though I looked
For the first time at the sea.
……………………..
In a Hospital: IV
Open Windows
Out of the window a sea of green trees
Lift their soft boughs like the arms of a dancer,
They beckon and call me, “Come out in the sun!”
But I cannot answer.
I am alone with Weakness and Pain,
Sick abed and June is going,
I cannot keep her, she hurries by
With the silver-green of her garments blowing.
Men and women pass in the street
Glad of the shining sapphire weather,
But we know more of it than they,
Pain and I together.
They are the runners in the sun,
Breathless and blinded by the race,
But we are watchers in the shade
Who speak with Wonder face to face.
The New Moon
Day, you have bruised and beaten me,
As rain beats down the bright, proud sea,
Beaten my body, bruised my soul,
Left me nothing lovely or whole—
Yet I have wrested a gift from you,
Day that dies in dusky blue:
For suddenly over the factories
I saw a moon in the cloudy seas—
A wisp of beauty all alone
In a world as hard and gray as stone—
Oh who could be bitter and want to die
When a maiden moon wakes up in the sky?
Eight O’Clock
Supper comes at five o’clock,
At six, the evening star,
My lover comes at eight o’clock—
But eight o’clock is far.
How could I bear my pain all day
Unless I watched to see
The clock-hands laboring to bring
Eight o’clock to me.
If Death Is Kind
Perhaps if Death is kind, and there can be returning,
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.
We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free.”
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