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Poets' Corner Scripting © 2000, 2020 S.L. Spanoudis and
theotherpages.org.
All rights reserved worldwide.
Transcribed for Poets' Corner
July 2000 by S.L.Spanoudis
[This 1917 work is believed to be in the public domain in the US. Please check local restrictions in other geographies.]
[Editor's Note: This book, as originally published, contains many selections taken from two of Teasdale's previous works, Rivers to the Sea and Helen of Troy and Other Poems. Only a few of these poems are included in this online version, primarily in cases where Teasdale made slight changes from earlier versions. Note that she left instructions for only about 15 of the works from sections I and III be included in her Collected Poems. Modifications are individually noted for each poem. -- Steve]
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Love Songs
by Sara Teasdale
To E.
[1917]
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Part II
Interlude: Songs out of Sorrow
I. Spirit's House
- FROM naked stones of agony
- I will build a house for me;
- As a mason all alone
- I will raise it, stone by stone,
- And every stone where I have bled
- Will show a sign of dusky red.
- I have not gone the way in vain,
- For I have good of all my pain;
- My spirit's quiet house will be
- Built of naked stones I trod
- On roads where I lost sight of God.
II. Mastery
- I WOULD not have a god come in
- To shield me suddenly from sin,
- And set my house of life to rights;
- Nor angels with bright burning wings
- Ordering my earthly thoughts and things;
- Rather my own frail guttering lights
- Wind blown and nearly beaten out;
- Rather the terror of the nights
- And long, sick groping after doubt;
- Rather be lost than let my soul
- Slip vaguely from my own control --
- Of my own spirit let me be
- In sole though feeble mastery.
III. Lessons
- UNLESS I learn to ask no help
- From any other soul but mine,
- To seek no strength in waving reeds
- Nor shade beneath a straggling pine;
- Unless I learn to look at Grief
- Unshrinking from her tear-blind eyes,
- And take from Pleasure fearlessly
- Whatever gifts will make me wise --
- Unless I learn these things on earth,
- Why was I ever given birth?
IV. Wisdom
- WHEN I have ceased to break my wings
- Against the faultiness of things,
- And learned that compromises wait
- Behind each hardly opened gate,
- When I can look Life in the eyes,
- Grown calm and very coldly wise,
- Life will have given me the Truth,
- And taken in exchange -- my youth.
V. In a Burying Ground
- This is the spot where I will lie
- When life has had enough of me,
- These are the grasses that will blow
- Above me like a living sea.
- These gay old lilies will not shrink
- To draw their life from death of mine,
- And I will give my body's fire
- To make blue flowers on this vine.
- "O Soul," I said, "have you no tears?
- Was not the body dear to you?"
- I heard my soul say carelessly,
- "The myrtle flowers will grow more blue."
VI. Wood Song
- I HEARD a wood thrush in the dusk
- Twirl three notes and make a star --
- My heart that walked with bitterness
- Came back from very far.
- Three shining notes were all he had,
- And yet they made a starry call --
- I caught life back against my breast
- And kissed it, scars and all.
Refuge
- FROM my spirit's gray defeat,
- From my pulse's flagging beat,
- From my hopes that turned to sand
- Sifting through my close-clenched hand,
- From my own fault's slavery,
- If I can sing, I still am free.
- For with my singing I can make
- A refuge for my spirit's sake,
- A house of shining words, to be
- My fragile immortality.
On to the next poem.
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