A Flint and a Fire- Sara Teasdale

Sara Teasdale.

 

Some years ago now, at a library book sale, I came across two small volumes joined together with a rubber band. I was living in Carlsbad, CA and that particular library used to set up a section of antique books...it was always the first stop for me. There is something special about an old book with it's usually worn cover, dog eared pages and sometimes if I'm lucky a little something extra will be tucked amongst the pages, something forgotten. You can always tell a book that has been loved as the energy of a past owner still lingers. In this case the slim volume was "Flame and Shadow" by Sara Teasdale, published in 1920  and the other, a newer volume of the collected works of Teasdale. Both had been owned by the same person as handwriting in both was the same and obviously this woman had loved the poetry of Sara. The borders full of notes and thoughts.  I had the feeling that I had found a treasure...and I was right. I fell in love with her words and her heart.

What do I care?

What do I care, in the dreams and the languor of spring,

That my songs do not show me at all?
For they are a fragrance, and I am a flint and a fire,
I am an answer, they are only a call.

But what do I care, for love will be over so soon,

Let my heart have its say and my mind stand idly by,

For my mind is proud and strong enough to be silent,

It is my heart that makes my songs, not I.
 

Sara ca.1918.

Born Sara Trevor Teasdale in St. Louis, Missouri in 1884 she was said to have suffered from poor health most of her life. She traveled to Chicago frequently and was involved in the poetry scene there with Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry Magazine (1912), and its distinguished circle of poets of the time. Her first book of verse was published in 1907 and another volume followed in 1911 and 1915. She married Ernst Filsinger, a wealthy businessman,  in 1914 though she had been courted by another famous poet of the time, Vachel Lindsay, for some time. She and her new husband moved to New York City in 1916 and in 1918 she won the first Columbia University Poetry Society Prize which later became known as the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Gray Eyes

It was April when you came

The first time to me,

And my first look in your eyes

Was like my first look at the sea.

We have been together

Four Aprils now

Watching for the green

On the swaying willow bough;

Yet whenever I turn

To your gray eyes over me,

It is as though I looked

For the first time at the sea.

 

 

Sara was considered a lyrical poet, her poetry sings... has a rhythm. Her 1917 book of poetry was called "Love Songs". As she aged the critics praised her growing poetic refinement. A critic of the time stated that "Flame and Shadow" was a volume to read with "reverence of joy." I agree.


The Dreams of my Heart

The dreams of my heart and my mind pass,

Nothing stays with me long,

But I have had from a child

The deep solace of song;

If that should ever leave me,

Let me find death and stay

With things whose tunes are played out and forgotten

Like the rain of yesterday.

 

White Fog

Heaven invading hills are drowned

In wide moving waves of mist,

Phlox before my door are wound

In dripping wreaths of amethyst.

Ten feet away the solid earth

Changes into melting cloud,

There is a hush of pain and mirth,

No bird has heart to speak aloud.

Here in a world without a sky,

Without the ground, without the sea,

The one unchanging thing is I,

Myself remains to comfort me.

 

 

 

I feel like my heart connects with hers as I read these lines. She is trying to find herself, define herself, make sense of her life, love and her art. It is like she is trying to heal her Self by sharing her deepest emotions and feelings. Her images of nature shows a woman who is close to the Earth...finds comfort there. A woman who is struggling with something deep inside. As the poems continue in "Flame and Shadow" you can already sense her preoccupation with death. Other books followed in 1926 and 1930. She divorced Ernst in 1929 and they say he was surprised. She moved just a couple of blocks away. She was left an invalid after a serious battle with pneumonia. She committed suicide in 1933 by overdose. Two years earlier Vachel had committed suicide.  Her final volume "Strange Victory" was published posthumously.

 

 

 

 

The Treasure

 

When they see my songs

They will sigh and say,

"Poor soul, wistful soul,

Lonely night and day."

They will never know

All your love for me

Surer than the spring,

Stronger than the sea;

Hidden out of sight

Like a miser's gold

In forsaken fields

Where the wind is cold.

 

 

This poem "There will come soft rains" inspired famed science fiction writer Ray Bradbury to write a short story by the same name in 1950.

 

 

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.


 

Sara's grave stone in Bellefontaine cemetery,  St Louis, Missouri.

 

If I am peaceful, I shall see

Beauty's face continually;

Feeding on her wine and bread

I shall be wholly comforted,

For she can make one day for me

Rich as my lost eternity.