Today’s Poem: Dusk in Autumn

Tea and cake and witches

Alice B. Preston, illustration for The Green Forest Fairy Book, 1920 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Dusk in Autumn

by Sara Teasdale

The moon is like a scimitar,
A little silver scimitar,
A-drifting down the sky.
And near beside it is a star,
A timid twinkling golden star,
That watches likes an eye.
 
And thro’ the nursery window-pane
The witches have a fire again,
Just like the ones we make, —
And now I know they’re having tea,
I wish they’d give a cup to me,
With witches’ currant cake.
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Like Robert Louis Stevenson and A.A. Milne, Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) is a poet of my earliest recollections, a staple of the children’s anthologies from which my parents read aloud when I, like Chrisopher Robin, was “very young.” Her poems for children are in many ways like her poems for adults: full of wintry stars above snowy hills or the chancy coming of spring, full of a sense that the world’s beauty is tempered with something cold, capricious, and maybe a just little bit cruel. 

And like Walter de la Mare, another poet whose name I can’t remember not knowing — these poets’ names themselves were incantatory as, later, the names and images on the old pack of Authors cards in the drawer at my grandparents’ house would be — Teasdale could access the child’s innate longing for mystery and the deep pleasure that a frisson of spookiness invokes. In my own childhood, this was the deep pleasure of Halloween itself. 

It wasn’t a major observance on the order of Christmas. But its very strangeness beguiled like nothing else. You dressed up, and with your parents, you went out into the dark as you would not ordinarily have done. You passed your familiar neighbors, each one made strange as you were strange yourself, behind the plastic mask with holes cut for eyes and mouth, the thin elastic band holding the mask to the wearer’s face getting tangled in the wearer’s hair, so that it had to be cut out at the end of the night. 

Although, as Methodists of the space age, our family didn’t belabor the presence of the spirit world all that much, still the library books we brought home all through October were full of shy little ghosts and well-meaning child witches, a whole alternate reality in which, if anything, supernatural beings were on the whole a lot nicer than we were. Yet their imaginary existence, in a mirror-world where night was day and adventures went on while the mortal world slept, was, again, a source of some deep, because very slightly creepy, pleasure. 

Sara Teasdale, 1919 (Wikimedia Commons)

That same pleasure animates Today’s Poem, a children’s poem first published in a 1911 issue of William Marion Reedy’s Reedy’s Mirror newspaper. In its two sestets — each a pair of tercets consisting of two tetrameter lines and one in trimeter, rhymed aabccb — the poem first grants a view of the night sky before making clear that the perspective is that of a child, both looking and imagining at the window of a nursery. 

The child’s world is one of warm, safe familiarity: the fires “we make,” the tea and currant cake of a nursery supper that furnish the child’s vision of the darker reality outside the window, or else reflected in it. Yet the child’s view of the sky, with which the poem opens, is not exactly comfortable. 

The crescent moon calls to mind not a half-eaten cookie (as in this Vachel Lindsay poem, another from my childhood), but a descending “scimitar,” its descent made more menacing by the repetition of the word as an end-rhyme in the first two lines. That “timid,” watchful star, too, gains some mesmerizing emphasis through repetition. 

By the second stanza, when the child sees either a bonfire somewhere out in the night, or else the reflection of the nursery fire in the dark windowpane, even the comfortable, familiar, childlike ritual of tea and cake is disturbed by the fact of its having a parallel in the spooky dream-reality of the night outside. 

In that reality, the witches’ tea and cake are bound to be more exciting, more magical, than the ordinary indoor fare. The child’s yearning for strangeness in the midst of the ordinary, for a hint of danger outside the safe window, gives this little poem its peculiar, unsettling charm. 

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