DARK
OF
THE
MOON

BOOKS BY SARA TEASDALE

• SONNETS TO DUSE (out of print)
• HELEN OF TROY AND OTHER POEMS
• RIVERS TO THE SEA
• LOVE SONGS
• FLAME AND SHADOW

ANTHOLOGIES:

• THE ANSWERING VOICE: ONE HUNDRED LOVE LYRICS BY WOMEN
• RAINBOW GOLD: POEMS OLD AND NEW, SELECTED FOR BOYS AND GIRLS

DARK OF THE MOON

By
SARA TEASDALE

NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1926

Copyright, 1921, by Harper Brothers, Charles Scribner’s Sons, The Century Company, Harcourt Brace and Company, George H. Doran Company, The New Republic, Inc., and The Yale Publishing Association.

Copyright, 1922, by The Century Company, Harcourt Brace and Company, Vanity Fair Publishing Company, Inc., and George H. Doran Company.

Copyright, 1923, by Charles Scribner’s Sons, The Century Company, The New Republic, Inc., Gene Derwood and The Atlantic Monthly Company.

Copyright, 1924, by The Dial Publishing Company, Inc., The Century Company, George H. Doran Co., and Harriet Monroe.

Copyright, 1925, by Harcourt Brace and Company, and The Yale Publishing Association.

Copyright, 1926, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, The Yale Publishing Association, The New Republic, Inc., The Saturday Review Co., Inc., Charles Scribner’s Sons, and The New York Herald-Tribune, Inc.

COPYRIGHT, 1926,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

to E.

Thanks are due to the editors of Scribner’s Magazine, The New Republic, The Yale Review, Poetry, The Dial, The Atlantic Monthly, The London Mercury and other publications for their permission to reprint certain of the following poems.

For permission to set any of the poems to music, application should be made to the author.

Contents

I
THERE
WILL
BE
STARS

On the Sussex Downs

Over the downs there were birds flying,

Far off glittered the sea,

And toward the north the weald of Sussex

Lay like a kingdom under me.

I was happier than the larks

That nest on the downs and sing to the sky,

Over the downs the birds flying

Were not so happy as I.

It was not you, though you were near,

Though you were good to hear and see,

It was not earth, it was not heaven

It was myself that sang in me.

August Night

On a midsummer night, on a night that was eerie with stars,

In a wood too deep for a single star to look through,

You led down a path whose turnings you knew in the darkness,

But the scent of the dew-dripping cedars was all that I knew.

I drank of the darkness, I was fed with the honey of fragrance,

I was glad of my life, the drawing of breath was sweet;

I heard your voice, you said, “Look down, see the glow-worm!”

It was there before me, a small star white at my feet.

We watched while it brightened as though it were breathed on and burning,

This tiny creature moving over earth’s floor—

“‘L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle,’”

You said, and no more.

Two Minds

Your mind and mine are such great lovers they

Have freed themselves from cautious human clay,

And on wild clouds of thought, naked together

They ride above us in extreme delight;

We see them, we look up with a lone envy

And watch them in their zone of crystal weather

That changes not for winter or the night.

Words for An Old Air

Your heart is bound tightly, let

Beauty beware,

It is not hers to set

Free from the snare.

Tell her a bleeding hand

Bound it and tied it,

Tell her the knot will stand

Though she deride it;

One who withheld so long

All that you yearned to take,

Has made a snare too strong

For Beauty’s self to break.

Mountain Water

You have taken a drink from a wild fountain

Early in the year;

There is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain

But down, my dear;

And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley

Will never seem fresh or clear

For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water

In the feathery green of the year.

At Tintagil

Iseult, Iseult, by the long waterways

Watching the wintry moon, white as a flower,

I have remembered how once in Tintagil

You heard the tread of Time hour after hour.

By casements hung with night, while all your women slept

You turned toward Brittany, awake, alone,

In the high chamber hushed, save where the candle dripped

With the slow patient sound of blood on stone.

The ache of empty arms was an old tale to you,

And all the tragic tunes that love can play,

Yet with no woman born would you have changed your lot,

Though there were greater queens who had been gay.

“There Will Be Stars”

There will be stars over the place forever;

Though the house we loved and the street we loved are lost,

Every time the earth circles her orbit

On the night the autumn equinox is crossed,

Two stars we knew, poised on the peak of midnight

Will reach their zenith; stillness will be deep;

There will be stars over the place forever,

There will be stars forever, while we sleep.

II
PICTURES
OF
AUTUMN

Autumn
(Parc Monceau)

I shall remember only these leaves falling

Small and incessant in the still air,

Yellow leaves on the dark green water resting

And the marble Venus there—

Is she pointing to her breasts or trying to hide them?

There is no god to care.

The colonnade curves close to the leaf-strewn water

And its reflection seems

Lost in the mass of leaves and unavailing

As a dream lost among dreams;

The colonnade curves close to the leaf-strewn water

A dream lost among dreams.

September Day
(Pont de Neuilly)

The Seine flows out of the mist

And into the mist again;

The trees lean over the water,

The small leaves fall like rain.

The leaves fall patiently,

Nothing remembers or grieves;

The river takes to the sea

The yellow drift of the leaves.

Milky and cold is the air,

The leaves float with the stream,

The river comes out of a sleep

And goes away in a dream.

Fontainebleau

Interminable palaces front on the green parterres,

And ghosts of ladies lovely and immoral

Glide down the gilded stairs,

The high cold corridors are clicking with the heel taps

That long ago were theirs.

But in the sunshine, in the vague autumn sunshine,

The geometric gardens are desolately gay;

The crimson and scarlet and rose-red dahlias

Are painted like the ladies who used to pass this way

With a ringletted monarch, a Henry or a Louis

On a lost October day.

The aisles of the garden lead into the forest,

The aisles lead into autumn, a damp wind grieves,

Ghostly kings are hunting, the boar breaks cover,

But the sounds of horse and horn are hushed in falling leaves,

Four centuries of autumns, four centuries of leaves.

Late October
(Bois de Boulogne)

Listen, the damp leaves on the walks are blowing

With a ghost of sound;

Is it a fog or is it a rain dripping

From the low trees to the ground?

If I had gone before, I could have remembered

Lilacs and green after-noons of May;

I chose to wait, I chose to hear from autumn

Whatever she has to say.

III
SAND
DRIFT

“Beautiful, Proud Sea”

Careless forever, beautiful proud sea,

You laugh in happy thunder all alone,

You fold upon yourself, you dance your dance

Impartially on drift-weed, sand or stone.

You make us believe that we can outlive death,

You make us for an instant, for your sake,

Burn, like stretched silver of a wave,

Not breaking, but about to break.

Land’s End

The shores of the world are ours, the solitary

Beaches that bear no fruit, nor any flowers,

Only the harsh sea-grass that the wind harries

Hours on unbroken hours.

No one will envy us these empty reaches

At the world’s end, and none will care that we

Leave our lost footprints where the sand forever

Takes the unchanging passion of the sea.

Sand Drift

I thought I should not walk these dunes again,

Nor feel the sting of this wind-bitten sand,

Where the coarse grasses always blow one way,

Bent, as my thoughts are, by an unseen hand.

I have returned; where the last wave rushed up

The wet sand is a mirror for the sky

A bright blue instant, and along its sheen

The nimble sandpipers run twinkling by.

Nothing has changed; with the same hollow thunder

The waves die in their everlasting snow—

Only the place we sat is drifted over,

Lost in the blowing sand, long, long ago.

Blue Stargrass

If we took the old path

In the old field

The same gate would stand there

That will never yield.

Where the sun warmed us

With a cloak made of gold,

The rain would be falling

And the wind would be cold;

And we would stop to search

In the wind and the rain,

But we would not find the stargrass

By the path again.

September Night

We walked in the dew, in the drowsy starlight

To the sleepless, sleepy sound

Of insects singing in the low sea-meadows

For miles and miles around;

With a wheel and a whirr the resistless rhythm

Trembled incessantly;

Antares was red in the sky before us,

And behind us, the blackness of the sea.

Low Tide

The birds are gathering over the dunes,

Swerving and wheeling in shifting flight,

A thousand wings sweep darkly by

Over the dunes and out of sight.

Why did you bring me down to the sea

With the gathering birds and the fish-hawk flying,

The tide is low and the wind is hard,

Nothing is left but the old year dying.

I wish I were one of the gathering birds,

Two sharp black wings would be good for me—

When nothing is left but the old year dying,

Why did you bring me down to the sea?

IV
PORTRAITS

Effigy of a Nun
(Sixteenth Century)

Infinite gentleness, infinite irony

Are in this face with fast-sealed eyes,

And round this mouth that learned in loneliness

How useless their wisdom is to the wise.

In her nun’s habit carved, patiently, lovingly,

By one who knew the ways of womankind,

This woman’s face still keeps, in its cold wistful calm,

All of the subtle pride of her mind.

These long patrician hands, clasping the crucifix,

Show she had weighed the world, her will was set;

These pale curved lips of hers, holding their hidden smile,

Once having made their choice, knew no regret.

She was of those who hoard their own thoughts carefully,

Feeling them far too dear to give away,

Content to look at life with the high, insolent

Air of an audience watching a play.

If she was curious, if she was passionate

She must have told herself that love was great,

But that the lacking it might be as great a thing

If she held fast to it, challenging fate.

She who so loved herself and her own warring thoughts,

Watching their humorous, tragic rebound,

In her thick habit’s fold, sleeping, sleeping,

Is she amused at dreams she has found?

Infinite tenderness, infinite irony

Are hidden forever in her closed eyes,

Who must have learned too well in her long loneliness

How empty wisdom is, even to the wise.

Those Who Love

Those who love the most,

Do not talk of their love,

Francesca, Guinevere,

Deirdre, Iseult, Heloise,

In the fragrant gardens of heaven

Are silent, or speak if at all

Of fragile, inconsequent things.

And a woman I used to know

Who loved one man from her youth,

Against the strength of the fates

Fighting in somber pride,

Never spoke of this thing,

But hearing his name by chance,

A light would pass over her face.

Epitaph

Serene descent, as a red leaf’s descending

When there is neither wind nor noise of rain,

But only autumn air and the unending

Drawing of all things to the earth again:

So be it; let the snow sift deep and cover

All that was drunken once with light and air;

The earth will not regret her tireless lover,

Nor he awake to know she does not care.

Appraisal

Never think she loves him wholly,

Never believe her love is blind,

All his faults are locked securely

In a closet of her mind;

All his indecisions folded

Like old flags that time has faded,

Limp and streaked with rain,

And his cautiousness like garments

Frayed and thin, with many a stain—

Let them be, oh let them be,

There is treasure to outweigh them,

His proud will that sharply stirred,

Climbs as surely as the tide,

Senses strained too taut to sleep,

Gentleness to beast and bird,

Humor flickering hushed and wide

As the moon on moving water,

And a tenderness too deep

To be gathered in a word.

The Wise Woman

She must be rich who can forego

An hour so jewelled with delight,