Assiduous readers of our Poem of the Day feature will, by now, have made more than a passing acquaintance with the poems of Sara Teasdale (1884–1933). In a brief career, cut even shorter by her suicide in 1933, Teasdale achieved a remarkable range of voice and form, as the examples of her poetry featured here in The New York Sun have displayed.

“Dusk in Autumn,” for example, with its close-set, hypnotic rhymes, exemplifies her gift for children’s verse, reveling in the spooky loveliness of a night near Halloween. “April,” too, is a child’s poem in its hopefulness, celebrating the coming of spring as the interior conviction of a thing not seen. “Blue Squills” articulates the almost unbearable pressure of beauty on a mind tuned, like a violin string, to a breaking point of sensitivity. And “Spring in Wartime,” the first Teasdale poem to run in this space, in March 2022, juxtaposes the fresh, familiar renewal of the year with the speaker’s awareness of horrors distant but real.

Always in Teasdale’s poems, even in her verse for children, beauty and joy are tempered with something complex, darker and stranger than the poems’ simple, usually quite formal surfaces let on at first. Today’s Poem of the Day characteristically offers the headiness of love sobered with grief and regret. Like “A Winter Blue-Jay,” which appeared as the Poem of the Day on January 9, “Summer Night, Riverside” chronicles a remembered love affair.

Its undulant lines, unrhymed and unmetered, suggest the flow of the Hudson River and of time itself, moving inexorably downstream. Like the “frail white stars,” the nights in the “wild summer darkness” have moved across 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 flowers from her hair. 

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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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 are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.