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…