Today’s Poem: A Winter Blue Jay
Who can tell the range of joy / Or set the bounds of beauty?
A Winter Blue Jay
by Sara Teasdale
Crisply the bright snow whispered, Crunching beneath our feet; Behind us as we walked along the parkway, Our shadows danced, Fantastic shapes in vivid blue. Across the lake the skaters Flew to and fro, With sharp turns weaving A frail invisible net. In ecstasy the earth Drank the silver sunlight; In ecstasy the skaters Drank the wine of speed; In ecstasy we laughed Drinking the wine of love. Had not the music of our joy Sounded its highest note? But no, For suddenly, with lifted eyes you said, “Oh look!” There, on the black bough of a snow flecked maple, Fearless and gay as our love, A bluejay cocked his crest! Oh who can tell the range of joy Or set the bounds of beauty? ═══════════════════════
Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) is a poet of sensibility, in the early-19th-century sense of that word. As Jane Austen uses it in Sense and Sensibility, to define the character of Marianne Dashwood, the word means the opposite of sensible. We would say sensitivity, or perhaps even hyper-sensitivity, with peculiarly Romantic overtones, in which the isolated self sends out its emotional tentacles in search of connection with a sentient and responsive universe. In Teasdale, a century on from the Romantics, that hyper-sensitivity still becomes, as it did for them, a way of apprehending reality. It’s not merely an overflow of emotion, but a process of perceiving and knowing the world, entering into and mediating experience.
In “Blue Squills,” which appeared as Today’s Poem last February 15, Teasdale’s speaker is not so much an Emersonian “transparent eyeball” as an exposed nerve, feeling whatever she feels to the point of pain. Even beauty inflicts itself on her, as an icy milkshake on a hot day causes a headache. Most of the time, in her poems, this exquisite juxtaposition of exaltation with pain occurs within the strict boundaries of poetic form. Rhyme and meter contain the excesses of feeling, shaping them into art. Although her poems often appear simple and controlled as a child’s nursery rhymes, her gift lay in her capacity for communicating mystery, trouble, some intensity of experience, beneath those polished surfaces.
Today’s Poem, “A Winter Blue Jay,” though unrhymed and irregularly metered (like “Summer Night, Riverside,” which appeared here last August), still constructs, with meticulous artifice, an experience in which joy reaches a climax, then surpasses that peak. Though the poem’s lines vary in length from dimeter to tetrameter, with forays into iambic pentameter, they most often resolve into an insistent trimeter which, as it repeats, echoes the strokes of the skaters on the ice, the footsteps of the lovers who walk out of their own blue shadows on this brilliant, frozen day. Repetition, that driving force, heightens the sense of ecstasy with each invocation of the word ecstasy, until it seems that ecstasy is what the world is made of.
“Had not the music of our joy / Sounded its highest note?” the speaker asks. It seems a rhetorical question. “But no!” Just when you think you’re feeling as much joy as you can bear, there’s more. Just when you think that life has sung its highest note, a bird — a flash of blue on a branch, akin to the blue of the flowers in “Blue Squills” — takes the whole thing up an octave. In that instant, reality asserts itself as larger and more infinite in its promises than it has seemed even an instant earlier. The world of this poem, as in all Teasdale’s work, is big and strange, straining at its own boundaries: beautiful, joyous with an intensity poised on the edge of pain.
So lovely! Thank you.....
And the culmination on the bluejay links with the culmination on the “vivid blue” of the shadows at the end of the opening sentence, both with their descriptions of shape and movement. Wonderful.
The artistry with which she plays with the rhythms isn’t obvious from a visual glance.
For instance, in contrast to the opening pair of “crisp” metrical trimeters, the following pentameter is an enlarged *rhythmic* trimeter (3 primary beats: 1st, 3rd & last), the expansion of a leisurely walk and a trailing behind - of the dancing shadows, which waltz through 3 tight rhythmic *pairs* of beats (couched within a dimeter & tetrameter), identically shaped.
The second sentence, observing the skaters, is a single metrical trimeter (again with that inviting tail - that extra endline offbeat -, just like the introductory 1st & 3rd lines) succeeded by another 3 pairs of beats - this time, confined to one line each. This time with more varied movement, as we move out from the individual “to and fro“ (expressed as two tight iambs), to the collective “weaving”, where we see the introduction of a falling rhythm on the 2nd beat pair (sharp turns / weaving), and a final anapest as the “frail” net expands.
One could analyse the rest of the poem similarly (including how the two metric monometers - ‘But no,’… ‘’”Oh, look!”’ - complete a rhythmic trimeter & 3 pairs of beats respectively), but I’ll finish by noting the neat, enhanced closure on a 4/3 common meter rhythm in the final two line sentence - this time, *ending* on that inviting tail!