Rivers to the Sea (1915) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poet’s third collection, published several years before 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, Rivers to the Sea revels in the mystery of existence itself. 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.
Spring Night, the collection’s opening poem, begins in quiet reverie, its speaker appreciating the beauty and mystery of a silent world while suffering from heartache and uncertainty: 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? A lyric poet to her core, Teasdale explores the highs and lows of love in her own life and in the lives of strangers. Personal and communal, public and private, her work is a testament to a life spent in observance. 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. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sara Teasdale’s Rivers to the Sea is a classic work of American poetry reimagined for modern readers.