Showing results by author "Sara Teasdale" in All Categories

Keats. A short life but a legacy of works that few, if any, can rival. And of course his end was to be tragically Romantic. Keats was returning one night to his home in Hampstead when he coughed. He coughed a single drop of blue blood upon his hand and said, ‘I know the colour of that blood, it is arterial blood, it is my death warrant, I must die’. And so it was that tuberculosis took its slow, devastating hold.

November - the 11th month of the year in the Gregorian calendar, when the land becomes bleaker, harsher but no less beautiful for that. For our poets, including Hood, Arnold, Melville, Alford, and Hardy, there is much to write and comment on.

February - the second month of the year in the Gregorian calendar brings not only the shortest month but, for lovers everywhere, Valentine's Day. On this and other themes, our poets, including Nesbit, Teasdale, and Coleridge, have much to say.

Dark of the Moon was first published in 1926. Its 92 poems are divided into 9 sections: There Will be Stars; Pictures of Autumn; Sand Drift; Portraits; Midsummer Nights; The Crystal Gazer; Berkshire Notes; Arcturus in Autumn; and The Flight. Teasdale repeatedly expresses the joy, wonder and freedom she feels when she is immersed in nature. Yet nature is not sufficient. She yearns for love and the rapture of “Two Minds” who have “freed themselves from cautious human clay.”

The year reaches its end with the Twelfth month. The landscape may be bleak, a sculpture of lines, monochrome dominates. The air carries the sounds of winter: wind, storms, silence. Our classic poets flex their lexicons with verse that describes all manner of events, sights and sounds. Among their ranks are Hardy, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Nesbit, Burns and a wealth of others, who, with their thoughts and desires express the world in lines of inky marvel.

LibriVox volunteers bring you 21 recordings of Grandfather's Love by Sara Teasdale. This was the Weekly Poetry project for August 13, 2023.-------- A whimsical look at an abstract gift as seen through a child's eyes. This Weekly Poem is taken from Helen of Troy, and Other Poems by Sara Teasdale (1911)