Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) is the kind of poet who grows on the reader the more she is read. A native of St. Louis, she lived much of her adult life in New York before her suicide at age 49. From her early popularity, including what is now counted as the first Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1917, she has faded somewhat. The generations trained on later modernist free verse tended to find her twee and dated in the delicacy of her womanly feelings.

Yet the more we trace our way through her work, the stronger she seems. This past August, The New York Sun offered “Blue Squills” as its Poem of the Day, a poem about seeing in nature a beauty so overwhelming that it is painful. And now, in time for Halloween, we have “Dusk in Autumn,” a children’s verse about twilight in the fall. In two six-line stanzas — each a pair of three-line clusters, two four-foot lines followed by a three-foot line, rhymed aabccb — she captures the happy spookiness of the drawing in of night at the close of an autumn day.

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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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.