Love Songs (1917) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poet’s fourth collection, for which she was awarded the 1918 Pulitzer Prize, is a masterful collection of lyric poems meditating on life, romance, and the natural world. Somber and celebratory, symbolic and grounded in experience, Love Songs revels in the mystery of existence itself. From despair to elation, confusion to security, Sara Teasdale captures the many emotions at work in the hearts of lovers. In “November,” she explores the strange feeling that accompany a relationship nearing a mutual ending: “The world is tired, the year is old, / The fading leaves are glad to die, / The wind goes shivering with cold / Where the brown reeds are dry.” Beginning her brief verse with an observation of autumn, Teasdale moves into a bittersweet stanza on love grown stagnant, mirroring the world approaching winter: “Our love is dying like the grass, / And we who kissed grow coldly kind, / Half glad to see our old love pass / Like leaves along the wind.” So far from spring, the only thing certain is that these lovers must part ways. Refusing to romanticize love, to portray it as wholly positive or negative, the poet crafts a timeless collection on a timeless theme. For Teasdale, a poet who merges an abiding affection for flora and fauna with a critical distance from human affairs, the belief in the life of the world, with or without us, is enough. This edition of Sara Teasdale’s Love Songs is a classic work of American poetry reimagined for modern readers.
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