sara teasdale and her beach poems

I wrote this piece over a year ago and figured I would share it in lieu of a proper introduction to this page. This is likely the style of writing I will be sharing on here (in other words, not football stuff). If you want to read this type of content, you can subscribe via Bluesky (email is not supported on leaflets yet). Otherwise, enjoy!

CW: brief mentions of suicide

I first encountered Sara Teasdale’s work when I read her poem There Will Come Soft Rains in a vignette from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. The vignette — named after the poem it contains — is fairly well known as a stand-alone piece, often taught in high school Lit classes. It was fine, but in my opinion, some of the other vignettes in the novel were far more deserving of recognition and analysis; Bradbury’s inclusion of topics from colonialism to class and race inequality in the space race (20 years before anyone would step foot on the moon) took me by surprise, but it was warmly welcomed. He writes of humans going to Mars, exposing indigenous people to earthly diseases, decimating their population in the process. He writes of Catholic priests and missions to cleanse the new world of sin. He writes of colonizers coming, building, and destroying centuries-old ruins with no regard for the people who lived there before. And, perhaps most importantly, he wrote Way in the Middle of the Air, maybe one of the most incredible science fiction short stories I have ever read, one that confronts racist sentiments of post-WWII America with vigor and understanding from a white author I have yet to see elsewhere in the genre. If you haven’t read it, you should.

There Will Come Soft Rains, however, stuck in my head (the poem, not the story). Although Teasdale wrote most of her work in the 1910s and early 20s, a hundred years later, it resonates now as then. The words of her poem, filled with beauty and the peacefulness of nature, feel like the antithesis of doom-scrolling and chronic pessimism. I would insert excerpts here, but I feel it’s best if you read the poem in its entirety:

There will come soft rains 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.

If poetry is gender, I am pansexual. Give me prose and train-of-thought poetry, give me high-structure verse and unique rhyme schemes, and, of course, give me everything in between. I will not discriminate, and I will love it all. That being said, there is something about Teasdale’s rhyme schemes that calls to me in a way prose poetry does not. Teasdale’s poems are not long, but once you read enough of her work, you start to notice the schemes and structures she comes back to again and again, and rather than feeling repetitive or redundant, it works every time. Her descriptive, nature-based writing style is elegant and beautiful, filling every line with smells and flavors and sights that lilt and flow off the page.

Most of all, though, her poems are hopeful. Yes, some are bleak and give a little window into what might have been going through her head in the later years — before she died by suicide — but even many of her poems that deal with death do so in a hopeful way. Here’s one of my favorites, If Death is Kind:

Perhaps if Death is kind, and there can be returning,

We will come back to earth some fragrant night,

And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending

Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.

We will come down at night to these resounding beaches

And the long gentle thunder of the sea,

Here for a single hour in the wide starlight

We shall be happy, for the dead are free.

This poem, along with the excerpt at the beginning of this article, come from her book Flame and Shadow. In the book, Teasdale includes a section called “By the Sea”, which I like to refer to as her 'beach poems'. These beach poems include my four favorite poems from the entire book: the above If Death is Kind, On the Dunes, June Night, and The Unchanging. I am particularly fond of the latter, if only for its reference to Sappho (😏).

You can read the rest of the poems here , but the gist is this: her beach poems are incredible. The feelings and sensations she crafts jump off the page, ingraining themselves in your brain and burrowing a small, comforting home that smells of rain and tastes like the sea. You understand her love for the world in which she lives and the debt she feels to the nature around her. Her fascination with dunes and crashing waves and honeysuckle feels as natural as anything; one must ask “how could you not love these things?” When she says that she will return to these beaches once she is dead, you feel a need to join her, as if to not do so would be to miss out terribly. And when she concludes:

Oh Earth, you gave me all I have,

I love you, I love you, -- oh what have I

That I can give you in return --

Except my body after I die?

You think that maybe you should do the same. After all, we come from the earth — from the sea and dunes — like our ancestors before us. Where else can we go but home when this life is done? I, for one, will be joining her.