Debtor

So long as my spirit still
Is glad of breath
And lifts its plumes of pride
In the dark face of death;
While I am curious still
Of love and fame,
Keeping my heart too high
For the years to tame,
How can I quarrel with fate
Since I can see
I am a debtor to life,
Not life to me?

Sara Teasdale

Sara Teasdale (August 8, 1884 – January 29, 1933) was an American lyric poet. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri and her first poem publication was in 1907. Teasdale's style was characterized by clarity and simplicity, often focusing on themes of love, nature, and death. She won the Columbia University Poetry Society Prize for her 1917 collection Love Songs. Unfortunately, she faced severe health issues and depression towards the end of her life, leading to her suicide in 1933.

Sara Teasdale

The Song Maker

Sara Teasdale, Simple Poetry

Spray

Sara Teasdale, Simple Poetry

Soul's Birth

Sara Teasdale, Simple Poetry

May Night

Sara Teasdale, Simple Poetry

English

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Debt

What do I owe to you
Who loved me deep and long?
You never gave my spirit wings
Or gave my heart a song.

But oh, to him I loved,
Who loved me not at all,
I owe the open gate
That led through heaven's wall.

Sara Teasdale

Since There Is No Escape

Since there is no escape, since at the end
My body will be utterly destroyed,
This hand I love as I have loved a friend,
This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed;
Since there is no escape even for me
Who love life with a love too sharp to bear:
The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea
And hours alone too still and sure for prayer,
Since darkness waits for me, then all the more
Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore
In pride; and let me sing with my last breath;
In these few hours of light I lift my head;
Life is my lover, I shall leave the dead
If there is any way to baffle death.

Sara Teasdale

Refuge

From my spirits gray defeat,
From my pulses flagging beat,
From my hopes that turned to sand
Sifting through my close-clenched hand,
From my own faults slavery,
If I can sing, I still am free.

For with my singing I can make
A refuge for my spirits sake,
A house of shining words, to be
My fragile immortality.

Sara Teasdale

Song Making

My heart cried like a beaten child
Ceaselessly all night long;
I had to take my own cries
And thread them into a song.

One was a cry at black midnight
And one when the first cock crew,
My heart was like a beaten child,
But no one ever knew.

Life, you have put me in your debt
And I must serve you long,
But oh, the debt is terrible
That must be paid in song.

Sara Teasdale

To Marguerite

So great my debt to thee, I know my life
Is all too short to pay the least I owe,
And though I live it all in that sweet strife,
Still shall I be insolvent when I go.
Bid, then, thy Bailiff Cupid come to me
And bind and lead me wheresoeer thou art,
And let me live in sweet captivity
Within the debtors prison of thy heart.

Ellis Parker Butler

Interlude: Songs Out Of Sorrow

I. Spirit's House

From naked stones of agony
I will build a house for me;
As a mason all alone
I will raise it, stone by stone,
And every stone where I have bled
Will show a sign of dusky red.
I have not gone the way in vain,
For I have good of all my pain;
My spirit's quiet house will be
Built of naked stones I trod
On roads where I lost sight of God.

II. Mastery

I would not have a god come in
To shield me suddenly from sin,
And set my house of life to rights;
Nor angels with bright burning wings
Ordering my earthly thoughts and things;
Rather my own frail guttering lights
Wind blown and nearly beaten out;
Rather the terror of the nights
And long, sick groping after doubt;
Rather be lost than let my soul
Sl...

Sara Teasdale