Today’s Poem: Blue Squills

Sara Teasdale on beauty as pain

Siberian squill, Lancaster County, PA (Wikimedia Commons)

A reviewer once described a collection of her poems as “a little volume of joyous and unstudied song.” But the poems of Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) strike me as neither joyous, exactly, nor at all unstudied. In a brief career cut even shorter by her suicide in 1933, Teasdale wrote poems about beauty: the springtime, the sharp brilliance of winter stars, fleeting moments of giddy love that could be described as joyous.

But reading these poems, you sense their joy as something paid out in finite quantities and always undercut by despair. Their quality is that of a vibrating string wound to its breaking point. And once you sense that brittle vibrancy, you sense as well that in the white space where the poem lapses into silence, the string might well go ahead and snap. Often it’s only Teasdale’s intensely studied formal control, evident even in unmetered, unrhymed poems, that holds things together long enough for the poem to reach its conclusion. 

Sara Teasdale, 1914 (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s poem, “Blue Squills,” makes a characteristic Teasdale move: the conflation of beauty and joy with pain. Its ballad stanzas, alternating tetrameter with trimeter, echo Emily Dickinson’s common meter, and hint at the same hypersensitive awareness that we find in Dickinson. The poem begins with a triggering epiphany. Its speaker sees, as if for the first time, the intensity of the cherry bough’s whiteness, juxtaposed with the blue of the squills, or scilla, blooming beneath it. The colors, heightened by contrast to the level of paradox, blaze up in her vision: brilliant but fleeting, brief but perpetual as April itself.

The blooms will die before she does, yet returning year after year, they will also outlive her. Their glory impresses itself on her as suffering — a welcome suffering, because it means that at least in this moment she is alive and awake to beauty. If beauty is this kind of experience, not a joy so much as a wounding, then perhaps even in death she may hope to carry, “through endless sleep,” the memory of it, indelible as a scar. 

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Blue Squills 

by Sara Teasdale 

How many million Aprils came 
Before I ever knew 
How white a cherry bough could be, 
A bed of squills how blue!  

And many a light-foot April, 
When life is done with me, 
Will lift the blue flame of the flower, 
The white flame of the tree.  

Oh, burn me with your beauty then, 
Oh, hurt me, tree and flower, 
Lest in the end death try to take 
Even this glistening hour.  

O shaken flowers, O shimmering trees, 
O sunlight white and blue, 
Wound me, that I, through endless sleep, 
May bear the scar of you!  

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White cherry in bloom (via craiyon.com)