“Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,/Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;/Laugh, heart, again”

For Poetry Monday:

Leaves, Sara Teasdale

One by one, like leaves from a tree
All my faiths have forsaken me;
But the stars above my head
Burn in white and delicate red,
And beneath my feet the earth
Brings the sturdy grass to birth.
I who was content to be
But a silken-singing tree,
But a rustle of delight
In the wistful heart of night—
I have lost the leaves that knew
Touch of rain and weight of dew.
Blinded by a leafy crown
I looked neither up nor down—
But the little leaves that die
Have left me room to see the sky;
Now for the first time I know
Stars above and earth below.


From Poetry October 1915. Teasdale, a pioneering Modernist feminist poet, received the first Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1918. (Technically it was a special jury award, but after first she and then Carl Sandburg were awarded them, the Pulitzer committee created poetry as a regular category.)

---L.

Subject quote from Into the Twilight, William Butler Yeats being possibly too on-point to head this post.