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3.95 AVERAGE
3.95 AVERAGE
Now in the public domain, this collection of Teasdale's followed her collection Love Songs, which famously won the first-ever Pulitzer awarded for poetry, in 1918. Many of the poems haven't held up especially well; still, there are fine lines, such as these from "On the Dunes":
"If life was small, if it has made me scornful,
Forgive me; I shall straighten like a flame
In the great calm of death...."
Also, poems like Teasdale's "Open Windows" presage the contemporary surge in poetry about living with chronic pain and chronic illness, contrasting the experiences of those living without pain and those living with it in this pithy stanza:
"They are the runners in the sun,
Breathless and blinded by the race,
But we are watchers in the shade
Who speak with Wonder face to face."
There are a couple extended metaphors in this book that are strikingly fresh and good, as in the poem "Driftwood," where Teasdale uses the following terms to evoke how her past romantic relationships have shaped her present selfhood:
"As the driftwood burning
Learned its jewelled blaze
From the sea's blue splendor
Of colored nights and days."
And in the poem "The Net," where she laments language's inability to fully capture the object it wants to describe:
"It was as though I curved my hand
And dipped sea-water eagerly,
Only to find it lost the blue
Dark splendor of the sea."
[That blue splendid sea again!]
Another electrically tight moment occurs in "Blue Squills," a particularly effective embodiment of Teasdale's recurring theme of beauty's role as a counterweight to, or atonement for, death (also a favorite theme of Millay, who would win the Pulitzer a couple years later):
"Oh burn me with your beauty, then,....
Wound me, that I, through endless sleep,
May bear the scar of you."
"If life was small, if it has made me scornful,
Forgive me; I shall straighten like a flame
In the great calm of death...."
Also, poems like Teasdale's "Open Windows" presage the contemporary surge in poetry about living with chronic pain and chronic illness, contrasting the experiences of those living without pain and those living with it in this pithy stanza:
"They are the runners in the sun,
Breathless and blinded by the race,
But we are watchers in the shade
Who speak with Wonder face to face."
There are a couple extended metaphors in this book that are strikingly fresh and good, as in the poem "Driftwood," where Teasdale uses the following terms to evoke how her past romantic relationships have shaped her present selfhood:
"As the driftwood burning
Learned its jewelled blaze
From the sea's blue splendor
Of colored nights and days."
And in the poem "The Net," where she laments language's inability to fully capture the object it wants to describe:
"It was as though I curved my hand
And dipped sea-water eagerly,
Only to find it lost the blue
Dark splendor of the sea."
[That blue splendid sea again!]
Another electrically tight moment occurs in "Blue Squills," a particularly effective embodiment of Teasdale's recurring theme of beauty's role as a counterweight to, or atonement for, death (also a favorite theme of Millay, who would win the Pulitzer a couple years later):
"Oh burn me with your beauty, then,....
Wound me, that I, through endless sleep,
May bear the scar of you."
dark
emotional
sad
While I didn't love the overall tone of the book, there were enough individual poems here that I really liked to rate the book four stars.