“the wild woods and the plains / And the pools where winter rains / Image all their roof of leaves”

Poetry Monday:


September Midnight, Sara Teasdale

Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.

The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,
The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence
Under a moon waning and worn, broken,
Tired with summer.

Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heavy.

Over my soul murmur your mute benediction,
While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest,
As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,
Lest they forget them.


Okay, so it's no longer September, but only just. Work with me here. Teasdale (1884-1933) is one of several important first-generation modernist poets no longer remembered in the Canonical Story of Modernism because later trends, following the Pound-Eliot stream, depreciated the sort of lyric poetry and quiet ironies she excelled at. She was a bestseller in the field, and won the first Pulitzer Prize for poetry (under the prize's previous name). The form is an English accentual version of the Saphhic stanza.

---L.

Subject quote from To Jane: The Invitation, Percy Shelley.