Poem of the Day: ‘Blue Squills’

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.