Three poems for May by Sara Teasdale

May Night

The spring is fresh and fearless 

And every leaf is new, 

The world is brimmed with moonlight, 

The lilac brimmed with dew. 

Here in the moving shadows 

I catch my breath and sing-- 

My heart is fresh and fearless 

And over-brimmed with spring.

There Will Come Soft Rain

There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground, 

And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; 

And frogs in the pools singing at night, 

And wild plum trees in tremulous white; 

Robins will wear their feathery fire, 

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; 

And not one will know of the war, not one 

Will care at last when it is done. 

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, 

If mankind perished utterly; 

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn 

Would scarcely know that we were gone.

May

The wind is tossing the lilacs, 

The new leaves laugh in the sun, 

And the petals fall on the orchard wall, 

But for me the spring is done. 

Beneath the apple blossoms 

I go a wintry way, 

For love that smiled in April 

Is false to me in May.

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) was an American poet born, like fellow American poet, four years her junior, T.S. Eliot, in St. Louis, MO. Unlike Eliot, she wrote traditional and formally structured lyrics, most of which are brief but densely packed with meaning. In 1918, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1917 collection of poems Love Song. (Although the prize was not officially offered for poetry until 1922, Columbia University, which awards the prize, considers Teasdale its first recipient, due to a special grant making the award possible for that year.) Early in her career, she was courted by another American poet, Vachel Lindsay, who, realizing he could not support her on his meager income, ended their romance. In 1929, after divorcing her husband Ernst Filsinger, she rekindled her friendship with Lindsay, who at the time was also married and had children. Four years later, suffering from depression and loneliness, she committed suicide (Lindsay had committed suicide two years earlier). Fans of American writer Ray Bradbury will recognize in the second poem of this collection the inspiration for one of his more famous short stories, which bears the same name.