Customer Reviews

Rivers to the Sea

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The tragic Sara Teasdale was one of the foremost female poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with her formal style and focus on romance. "Rivers To the Sea" is a solid collection of her work, and has many of her best-known love poems in it.

Although the early twentieth century saw the blossoming of the "new" poetry, Teasdale stuck to more formal prose: "The fountain shivers lightly in the rain/the laurels drip, the fading roses fall/the marble satyr plays a mournful strain/That leaves the rainy fragrance musical." Not terribly original in HOW it's written, but the rich language is all the more striking.

While Teasdale experimented late in her life, "Rivers to the Sea" mostly sticks to formal styles. Sometimes she did dense, intense, longer poems that seemed to have been written a long time ago. "Ah, Love there is no fleeing from thy might,/No lonely place where thou hast never trod,/No desert thou hast left uncarpeted/With flowers that spring beneath thy perfect feet."

But some of her poems are more like songs: "I am not yours, not lost in you,/Not lost, altho' I long to be/Lost as a candle lit at noon,/Lost as a snow-flake in the sea." In general, these ballads are much prettier and more accessable than the more intense and unstructured poems.

It's a sad irony that Teasdale wrote mostly romantic poetry -- very, VERY romantic poetry -- yet she never had a successful romance in her short life. Maybe that is why so many of her poems have a touch of fantasy about them -- it's the sort of love that reality might not be able to stand up to.

But she was obviously in love with love: "But oh, to him I loved/Who loved me not at all/I owe the little open gate/That led thru heaven's wall." Imagine having that written to you, or at least given to illustrate the feelings. Almost every poem in the eight books deals with romance, lovers, and how much she adored both.

In fact, after awhile it gets a little tedious; it would get dull if she didn't occasionally write about other things ("Oh when God made Italy he was gay and young!"). However, Teasdale's love poetry is extremely beautiful and richly written, so that it's hard not to get dewy-eyed when reading them individually.

Beautiful words and Italy are what "Rivers to the Sea" is made of. And Sara Teasdale's melancholy love poetry is definitely a must-read, for lovers of poetry, or just plain lovers.

I don't consider myself a poetry fan at all, but for whatever reason, Amazon led me to this collection and I downloaded for my Kindle (what's the risk as it was free?)

Well, I was quite pleasantly surprised by this collection. You can feel that the poet had a love for life, but the often melancholy poetry really hits home. An example is probably my favorite, "The Look".

"Strephon kissed me in the spring, Robin in the fall,But Colin only looked at me. And never kissed at all.

Strephon's kiss was lost in jest, Robin's lost in play, But the kiss in Colin's eyes Haunts me night and day."

It's a short collection (poetry, not a novel), so if you like this sample, download it free for Kindle and give it a shot.