Sara Teasdale – Song At Capri

When beauty grows too great to bear

How shall I ease me of its ache,

For beauty more than bitterness

Makes the heart break.

Now while I watch the dreaming sea

With isles like flowers against her breast,

Only one voice in all the world

Could give me rest.

Sara Teasdale – There Will Come Soft Rain

There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,

And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,

And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one

Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,

If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn

Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Sara Teasdale – Love In Autumn

I sought among the drifting leaves,

The golden leaves that once were green,

To see if Love were hiding there

And peeping out between.

For thro' the silver showers of May

And thro' the summer's heavy heat,

In vain I sought his golden head

And light, fast-flying feet.

Perhaps when all the world is bare

And cruel winter holds the land,

The Love that finds no place to hide

Will run and catch my hand.

I shall not care to have him then,

I shall be bitter and a-cold --

It grows too late for frolicking

When all the world is old.

Then little hiding Love, come forth,

Come forth before the autumn goes,

And let us seek thro' ruined paths

The garden's last red rose.

Sara Teasdale – After Love

There is no magic any more,

We meet as other people do,

You work no miracle for me

Nor I for you.

You were the wind and I the sea -

There is no splendor any more,

I have grown listless as the pool

Beside the shore.

But though the pool is safe from storm

And from the tide has found surcease,

It grows more bitter than the sea,

For all its peace.

Sara Teasdale – Advice To A Girl

No one worth possessing

Can be quite possessed;

Lay that on your heart,

My young angry dear;

This truth, this hard and precious stone,

Lay it on your hot cheek,

Let it hide your tear.

Hold it like a crystal

When you are alone

And gaze in the depths of the icy stone.

Long, look long and you will be blessed:

No one worth possessing

Can be quite possessed.

Sara Teasdale – Helen Of Troy

Wild flight on flight against the fading dawn

The flames' red wings soar upward duskily.

This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead

That sparkled so the day I saw it first,

And darkened slowly after. I am she

Who loves all beauty -- yet I wither it.

Why have the high gods made me wreak their wrath --

Forever since my maidenhood to sow

Sorrow and blood about me? Lo, they keep

Their bitter care above me even now.

It was the gods who led me to this lair,

That tho' the burning winds should make me weak,

They should not snatch the life from out my lips.

Olympus let the other women die;

They shall be quiet when the day is done

And have no care to-morrow. Yet for me

There is no rest. The gods are not so kind

To her made half immortal like themselves.

It is to you I owe the cruel gift,

Leda, my mother, and the Swan, my sire,

To you the beauty and to you the bale;

For never woman born of man and maid

Had wrought such havoc on the earth as I,

Or troubled heaven with a sea of flame

That climbed to touch the silent whirling stars

And blotted out their brightness ere the dawn.

Have I not made the world to weep enough?

Give death to me. Yet life is more than death;

How could I leave the sound of singing winds,

The strong sweet scent that breathes from off the sea,

Or shut my eyes forever to the spring?

I will not give the grave my hands to hold,

My shining hair to light oblivion.

Have those who wander through the ways of death,

The still wan fields Elysian, any love

To lift their breasts with longing, any lips

To thirst against the quiver of a kiss?

Lo, I shall live to conquer Greece again,

To make the people love, who hate me now.

My dreams are over, I have ceased to cry

Against the fate that made men love my mouth

And left their spirits all too deaf to hear

The little songs that echoed through my soul.

I have no anger now. The dreams are done;

Yet since the Greeks and Trojans would not see

Aught but my body's fairness, till the end,

In all the islands set in all the seas,

And all the lands that lie beneath the sun,

Till light turn darkness, and till time shall sleep,

Men's lives shall waste with longing after me,

For I shall be the sum of their desire,

The whole of beauty, never seen again.

And they shall stretch their arms and starting, wake

With "Helen!" on their lips, and in their eyes

The vision of me. Always I shall be

Limned on the darkness like a shaft of light

That glimmers and is gone. They shall behold

Each one his dream that fashions me anew; --

With hair like lakes that glint beneath the stars

Dark as sweet midnight, or with hair aglow

Like burnished gold that still retains the fire.

Yea, I shall haunt until the dusk of time

The heavy eyelids filled with fleeting dreams.

I wait for one who comes with sword to slay --

The king I wronged who searches for me now;

And yet he shall not slay me. I shall stand

With lifted head and look within his eyes,

Baring my breast to him and to the sun.

He shall not have the power to stain with blood

That whiteness -- for the thirsty sword shall fall

And he shall cry and catch me in his arms,

Bearing me back to Sparta on his breast.

Lo, I shall live to conquer Greece again!

Sara Teasdale – After Parting

Oh I have sown my love so wide

That he will find it everywhere;

It will awake him in the night,

It will enfold him in the air.

I set my shadow in his sight

And I have winged it with desire,

That it may be a cloud by day

And in the night a shaft of fire.

Sara Teasdale – In A Restaurant

The darkened street was muffled with the snow,

The falling flakes had made your shoulders white,

And when we found a shelter from the night

Its glamor fell upon us like a blow.

The clash of dishes and the viol and bow

Mingled beneath the fever of the light.

The heat was full of savors, and the bright

Laughter of women lured the wine to flow.

A little child ate nothing while she sat

Watching a woman at a table there

Learn to kiss beneath a drooping hat.

The hour went by, we rose and turned to go,

The somber street received us from the glare,

And once more on your shoulders fell the snow.

Sara Teasdale – A Winter Night

My window-pane is starred with frost,

The world is bitter cold to-night,

The moon is cruel, and the wind

Is like a two-edged sword to smite.

God pity all the homeless ones,

The beggars pacing to and fro.

God pity all the poor to-night

Who walk the lamp-lit streets of snow.

My room is like a bit of June,

Warm and close-curtained fold on fold,

But somewhere, like a homeless child,

My heart is crying in the cold.