Rivers to the Sea

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."

Clever imagery and timeless emotion and at a great price.

Depending on where you are in your life you will seize the positive or accentuate the negative or just bask in the melancholy.