Flame and Shadow

By Sara Teasdale and Mint Editions

Flame and Shadow (1920) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poet’s fifth collection, published two years after she won the 1918 Pulitzer Prize, is a masterful collection of lyric poems meditating on life, death, and the natural world. Somber and celebratory, symbolic and grounded in experience, Flame and Shadow revels in the mystery of existence itself. “What do I care, in the dreams and the languor of spring, / That my songs do not show me at all?” Content to depict the rhythms of nature, the songs of birds, and “the silver light after a storm,” Teasdale’s poetry dissolves the poet’s ego in order to access a deeper well of creative energy: “For my mind is proud and strong enough to be silent, / It is my heart that makes my songs, not I.” In “There Will Come Soft Rains,” a poem born from a decade of war and widespread disease, Teasdale imagines a posthuman world where beauty and harmony continue despite our disappearance: “Robins will wear their feathery fire / Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war…” For Teasdale, a poet who merges an abiding affection for flora and fauna with a critical distance from human affairs, the belief in the life of the world, with or without us, is enough. This edition of Sara Teasdale’s Flame and Shadow is a classic work of American poetry reimagined for modern readers.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Mint Editions
• Release date: Jun 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781513224763

Sara Teasdale

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) was an American poet. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Teasdale suffered from poor health as a child before entering school at the age of ten. In 1904, after graduating from Hosmer Hall, Teasdale joined the group of female artists known as The Potters, who published The Potter’s Wheel, a monthly literary and visual arts magazine, from 1904 to 1907. With her first two collections—Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems (1907) and Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)—Teasdale earned a reputation as a gifted lyric poet from critics and readers alike. In 1916, following the publication of her bestselling Rivers to the Sea (1915), she moved to New York City with her husband Ernst Filsinger. There, she won the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for Love Songs (1917), her fourth collection. Frustrated with Filsinger’s prolonged absences while traveling for work, she divorced him in 1929 and moved to another apartment in the Upper West Side. Renewing her friendship with poet Vachel Lindsay, she continued to write and publish poems until her death by suicide in 1933.

Book preview

I

BLUE SQUILLS

How many million Aprils came

Before I ever knew

How white a cherry bough could be,

A bed of squills, how blue!

And many a dancing April

When life is done with me,

Will lift the blue flame of the flower

And the white flame of the tree.

Oh burn me with your beauty, then,

Oh hurt me, tree and flower,

Lest in the end death try to take

Even this glistening hour.

O shaken flowers, O shimmering trees,

O sunlit white and blue,

Wound me, that I, through endless sleep,

May bear the scar of you.

STARS

Alone in the night

On a dark hill

With pines around me

Spicy and still,

And a heaven full of stars

Over my head,

White and topaz

And misty red;

Myriads with beating

Hearts of fire

That aeons

Cannot vex or tire;

Up the dome of heaven

Like a great hill,

I watch them marching

Stately and still,

And I know that I

Am honored to be

Witness

Of so much majesty.

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.

MEADOWLARKS

In the silver light after a storm,

Under dripping boughs of bright new green,

I take the low path to hear the meadowlarks

Alone and high-hearted as if I were a queen.

What have I to fear in life or death

Who have known three things: the kiss in the night,

The white flying joy when a song is born,

And meadowlarks whistling in silver light.

DRIFTWOOD

My forefathers gave me

My spirit’s shaken flame,

The shape of hands, the beat of heart,

The letters of my name.

But it was my lovers,

And not my sleeping sires,

Who gave the flame its changeful

And iridescent fires;

As the driftwood burning

Learned its jewelled blaze

From the sea’s blue splendor

Of colored nights and days.

I HAVE LOVED HOURS AT SEA

I have loved hours at