Poem of the Day: ‘Blue Squills’
In the imagination of the American poet Sara Teasdale, the world shines with a beauty so intense that it threatens at any moment to sharpen into grief.
In the imagination of the American poet Sara Teasdale (1884–1933), the world shines with a beauty so intense that it threatens at any moment to sharpen into grief. Though a reviewer described an early collection of her poems as “a little volume of joyous and unstudied song,” her work, taken as a whole, hardly generates the impression either of ingenuousness or of unalloyed joy. To acknowledge, for example, her sense of the “the faithful beauty of the stars” is also to acknowledge, in the same breath, her sense of the terrible brokenness of the world, illuminated and made visible by that beauty.
Characteristic of her work, today’s Poem of the Day conflates beauty and pain. For the speaker of “Blue Squills,” to perceive the whiteness of cherry blossom and the vibrant blue of a bed of scillas is to sustain a wound, incurable and irresistible. The poem’s simple common-meter quatrains (alternating four- and three-foot lines) trace the speaker’s sudden consciousness of the spring’s recurring beauty and her plea to “bear the scar,” so that even in death she will not have forgotten the vision.
Blue Squills
by Sara Teasdale
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 light-foot April,
When life is done with me,
Will lift the blue flame of the flower,
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 sunlight white and blue,
Wound me, that I, through endless sleep,
May bear the scar of you!
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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 will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
