Four Winds

Four Winds is a haunting lyric poem by Sara Teasdale, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (retroactively awarded for her 1917 collection Love Songs). The poem inhabits a liminal space between the living world and the realm of the dead, where four winds blow through a grove of trees. One carries the breath of dead children; another, the broad wind's measure; a third, the quietest dead. The fourth wind, the breath of the listener's own spirit, blows favorably, suggesting that the boundary between mortality and transcendence is thinner than we imagine. Teasdale's characteristic restraint and musicality transform what could be macabre into something luminous and strangely comforting. This is poetry that makes the invisible palpable, that lets us feel the presence of absence and understand that the dead are not silent but carried on winds that also touch the living.