4 December 2023

larryhammer: floral print origami penguin, facing left (Default)
For Poetry Monday, do we have time for more Teasdale?

Spring Night, Sara Teasdale

The park is filled with night and fog,
⁠  ⁠  The veils are drawn about the world,
The drowsy lights along the paths
⁠  ⁠  ⁠Are dim and pearled.

Gold and gleaming the empty streets,
⁠⁠  ⁠  Gold and gleaming the misty lake,
The mirrored lights like sunken swords,
⁠  ⁠  ⁠Glimmer and shake.

Oh, is it not enough to be
Here with this beauty over me?
My throat should ache with praise, and I
Should kneel in joy beneath the sky.
O, beauty, are you not enough?
Why am I crying after love,
With youth, a singing voice, and eyes
To take earth’s wonder with surprise?
Why have I put off my pride,
Why am I unsatisfied,—
I, for whom the pensive night
Binds her cloudy hair with light,—
I, for whom all beauty burns
Like incense in a million urns?
O beauty, are you not enough?
Why am I crying after love?


Yes—there is always time for more Teasdale. Unlike the previous handful of early 20th century female poets, her husband was not a writer, though Vachel Lindsay courted her hard in the early 1910s (she instead married a wealthy industrialist).

---L.

Subject quote from Torn, Natalie Imbruglia.

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