Spring Night

The park is filled with night and fog, 
  The veils are drawn about the world, 
The drowsy lights along the paths 
  Are dim and pearled.

Gold and gleaming the empty streets, 
  Gold and gleaming the misty lake, 
The mirrored lights light sunken swords, 
  Glimmer and shake.

Oh, is it not enough to be 
Here with this beauty over me?
My throat should ache with praise, and I 
Should kneel in joy beneath the sky. 
Oh, beauty, are you not enough?

Why am I crying after love 
With youth, a singing voice and eyes
To take earth’s wonder with surprise?
Why have I put off my pride, 
Why am I unsatisfied, 
I for whom the pensive night
Binds her cloudy hair with light,
I for whom all beauty burns 
Like incense in a million urns? 
Oh, beauty, are you not enough? 
Why am I crying after love?

Credit

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 22, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“Spring Night” appears in Sara Teasdale’s third poetry collection Rivers to the Sea (Macmillan, 1915). In Sara Teasdale: Woman & Poet (Harper & Row, 1979), author William Drake notes: “Temperamentally, through the sheltered childhood that held her an unwilling prisoner of the past, [Teasdale] belonged to the tradition of women’s poetry that flourished through the middle- and late-nineteenth century. But, thrown as she was into the conditions of a new age that arrived with shocking suddenness, she responded with courage, turning her girlish lyrics from conventional sentiment to a mature and unflinching exploration of the realities of her emotional life. […] She spoke for all women emerging from the humility of subservience into the pride of achievement, recognizing that her art sprang from the conflict of forces that pulled her in opposing directions.”