The Mother Of A Poet

by Sara Teasdale

　　

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She is too kind, I think, for mortal things, Too gentle for the gusty ways of earth; God gave to her a shy and silver mirth, And made her soul as clear And softly singing as an orchard spring's In sheltered hollows all the sunny year, A spring that thru the leaning grass looks up And holds all heaven in its clarid cup, Mirror to holy meadows high and blue With stars like drops of dew. I love to think that never tears at night Have made her eyes less bright; That all her girlhood thru Never a cry of love made over-tense Her voice's innocence; That in her hands have lain, Flowers beaten by the rain, And little birds before they learned to sing Drowned in the sudden ecstasy of spring. I love to think that with a wistful wonder She held her baby warm against her breast; That never any fear awoke whereunder She shuddered at her gift, or trembled lest Thru the great doors of birth Here to a windy earth She lured from heaven a half-unwilling guest. She caught and kept his first vague flickering smile, The faint upleaping of his spirit's fire; And for a long sweet while In her was all he asked of earth or heaven, But in the end how far, Past every shaken star, Should leap at last that arrow-like desire, His full-grown manhood's keen Ardor toward the unseen Dark mystery beyond the Pleiads seven. And in her heart she heard His first dim-spoken word, She only of them all could understand, Flushing to feel at last The silence over-past, Thrilling as tho' her hand had touched God's hand. But in the end how many words Winged on a flight she could not follow, Farther than skyward lark or swallow, His lips should free to lands she never knew; Braver than white sea-faring birds With a fearless melody, Flying over a shining sea, A star-white song between the blue and blue. Oh I have seen a lake as clear and fair As it were molten air, Lifting a lily upward to the sun. How should the water know the glowing heart That ever to the heaven lifts its fire, A golden and unchangeable desire? The water only knows The faint and rosy glows Of under-petals, opening apart. Yet in the soul of earth, Deep in the primal ground, Its searching roots are wound, And centuries have struggled toward its birth. So, in the man who sings, All of the voiceless horde From the cold dawn of things Have their reward; All in whose pulses ran Blood that is his at last, From the first stooping man Far in the winnowed past. Out of the tumult of their love and mating Each one created, seeing life was good, Dumb, till at last the song that they were waiting Breaks like brave April thru a wintry wood.

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