Rivers to the Sea (Version 2)

Sara Teasdale's "Rivers to the Sea" gathers poems of startling clarity and quiet devastation. Written in the years before her tragic death, these verses move like water itself, sometimes still, sometimes rushing toward an end the poet could already foresee. Teasdale writes of love that arrives and departs like seasons, of moonlight on snow, of the particular loneliness that comes from being alive in a beautiful world one cannot entirely join. Her Imagist discipline condenses enormous feeling into sparse, crystalline lines: a handful of words that somehow hold an entire grief. The collection moves from the tremulous hope of early love through the hard-won peace of acceptance, arriving finally at a kind of terrible serenity. Teasdale's gift was making the universal feel intimately hers, and hers feel somehow universal. A century later, these poems still possess that rare ability to make readers feel less alone in their own sorrow.