Today’s Poem: Summer Night, Riverside

Sara Teasdale looks back on a brief, lost enchantment

Alice Neel, Evening at Riverside Park, 1927 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Summer Night, Riverside

by Sara Teasdale

In the wild soft summer darkness
How many and many a night we two together
Sat in the park and watched the Hudson
Wearing her lights like golden spangles
Glinting on black satin.
The rail along the curving pathway
Was low in a happy place to let us cross,
And down the hill a tree that dripped with bloom
Sheltered us
While your kisses and the flowers,
Falling, falling,
Tangled my hair . . .

The frail white stars moved slowly over the sky.

And now, far off
In the fragrant darkness
The tree is tremulous again with bloom
For June comes back.

To-night what girl
When she goes home,
Dreamily before her mirror shakes from her hair
This year’s blossoms, clinging in its coils?

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Always in the poems of Sara Teasdale (1884–1933), whose “Blue Squills” we featured back in February, beauty and joy are tempered with something darker, stranger, and more emotionally complex than the poems’ simple surfaces might initially let on. Today’s Poem — not unlike Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo,” of much the same period, which readers will remember from its appearance here on June 14 — characteristically offers the headiness of young love, sobered in hindsight with grief and regret. 

In “Summer Night, Riverside,” from Teasdale’s 1915 collection Rivers to the Sea, the undulant unrhymed lines swell from trimeter to pentameter, then contract again to tetrameter, then trimeter, then in places to dimeter before expanding again. This metrical movement suggests the flow of the Hudson River as the two lovers have seen it, “wearing her lights like golden spangles,” but also the surge and ebb and flow of love’s cycles: happiness then for me, happiness now for someone else. The lines’ movement further suggests the flow of time itself, overriding its own spiraling eddies, moving inexorably downstream and away from the one remembered night. 

Like the “frail white stars,” the night figured as a “wild summer darkness” has crossed the sky of the present and vanished into the past. Though June recurs — the same stars, the same tree “tremulous again with bloom” — it’s some other girl who comes home, dazed with the same fleeting happiness, to shake the fallen flowers from her hair. 

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