Two Poems

by Sara Teasdale

Summer Night, Riverside


In the wild soft summer darkness
How many and many a night we two together
Sat in the park and watched the Hudson
Wearing her lights like golden spangles
Glinting on black satin.
The rail along the curving pathway
Was low in a happy place to let us cross,
And down the hill a tree that dripped with bloom
Sheltered us,
While your kisses and the flowers,
Falling, falling,
Tangled in my hair....


The frail white stars moved slowly over the sky.


And now, far off
In the fragrant darkness
The tree is tremulous again with bloom
For June comes back.


To-night what girl
Dreamily before her mirror shakes from her hair
This year's blossoms, clinging to its coils?






The Flight


We are two eagles
Flying together
Under the heavens,
Over the mountains,
Stretched on the wind.
Sunlight heartens us,
Blind snow baffles us,
Clouds wheel after us
Ravelled and thinned.


We are like eagles,
But when Death harries us,
Human and humbled
When one of us goes,
Let the other follow,
Let the flight be ended,
Let the fire blacken,
Let the book close.




Sara Teasdale was born on this day in 1884, in St. Louis. She has a star in the St. Louis Walk of Fame, not far from T. S. Eliot, born in St. Louis four years later. Teasdale's third poetry collection, Rivers to the Sea, was published in 1915 and was a best seller, being reprinted several times. A year later, in 1916 she moved to New York City with her husband Ernst Filsinger, where they resided in an Upper West Side apartment on Central Park West - she would soon divorce him. In 1918, her poetry collection Love Songs (released 1917) won three awards: the Columbia University Poetry Society prize, the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the annual prize of the Poetry Society of America.
"The Flight" above is thought to refer to her close friendship with the poet Vachel Lindsay.