Tag: Sara Teasdale

Star Gazing

Today is “Poem in Your Pocket Day,” a chance to carry a poem with you and share it. Poetry speaks to the feeling dimension at the heart of who we are, most often through metaphor.

I’ve chosen Sara Teasdale’s “Stars,” first published in 1917. Teasdale is also known for “There Will Come Soft Rains,” whose title Ray Bradbury later borrowed for one of his most memorable stories. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

“Stars” is a short poem whose apparent simplicity conceals careful craft:

“Stars”

Alone in the night
On a dark hill
With pines around me
Spicy and still,

And a heaven full of stars
Over my head,
White and topaz
And misty red;

Myriads with beating
Hearts of fire
That aeons
Cannot vex or tire;

Up the dome of heaven
Like a great hill,
I watch them marching
Stately and still,

And I know that I
Am honored to be
Witness of so much majesty.

The opening stanza—“Alone in the night / On a dark hill”—does not suggest loneliness so much as attentiveness. The speaker is set apart in order to perceive more fully. The “spicy and still” pines engage not only sight but scent, grounding the experience in the physical world.

In the second stanza, the sky’s “white and topaz / And misty red” stars introduce a quiet richness of color. Rather than dramatizing emotion, the imagery gently intensifies perception, drawing us into a heightened awareness.

The third stanza personifies the stars as having “beating / Hearts of fire.” This is a form of pathetic fallacy, but it feels less like projection than kinship. The stars are not indifferent; they seem alive with a steady, enduring energy, untouched by time’s vexations.

By the fourth stanza, the speaker’s response becomes more clearly shaped: the stars “marching / Stately and still” evoke a ceremonial procession, ordered and serene.

The final tercet—departing from the earlier quatrains—serves as a quiet coda:“I am honored to be witness of so much majesty.”

The shift in form underscores the inward turn toward gratitude.

A small poem, yet it opens onto something vast: a moment in which solitude becomes not isolation but privilege—the chance to witness a universe both immense and strangely intimate.

—rj

Sarah Teasdale: “There Will Come Soft Rains”

sara-teasdaleAm in a poetry mood again, which just shows you how subversive reading a poet’s biography can be (Nancy Milford’s Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay).

In doing so, I came across Sara Teasdale, a once in-vogue poet and first recipient of a Pulitzer for poetry (1922).

Teasdale wrote verse that’s direct and without complication or artifice, elements contemporary critics eschew. She didn’t make the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 2nd ed., one of the best repositories of verse in English out there.

I had come across her poetry before as a prof of modern poetry, but never found leisure to take her in.

I admire a number of her poems for their ability to resonate those salient emotions in all of us when it comes to nature, love and loss and, of course, mortality without engaging in self-pity or straying into sentimentality.

With their redolent attention to metrics, much of her poetry has transitioned into contemporary music; for example, the Scarecrow band rendition of eleven poems from Flame and Shadow.

And then there’s that enticing title of one of her poems, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” that I find among the most remarkably beautiful of all poetry titles. We principally know it today as Ray Bradbury’s title for one of his most celebrated stories, inspired by her poem.

Written shortly after the Great War, it features a world of nature absent of Man, who has annihilated himself. Lines 10-12 prove remarkably prescient in their intuitive application to our contemporary world with its apocalyptic tenor, replete with proliferation of nuclear arsenals; and yet Teasdale composed the poem in 1920.

Teasdale may not be one of our most renowned poets, but she wrote a haunting poetry of careful craftsmanship, rooted in the pathos of the human condition. She deserves a re-reading:

There will come soft rains 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.

–rj