Thursday 8 August 2019

Sara Teasdale (1884 – 1933) - American poet.

Sara Teasdale 1910
Sara was born Sarah Trevor Teasdale in St. Louis, Missouri on 8th August 1884.

Sara's first poem was published in a local newspaper, in 1907 and her first collection of poems, "Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems", was published that year too.

On 19th December 1914, Sara married Ernst Filsinger, an admirer of her poetry, after which she used the name Sara Teasdale Filsinger.

Sara Teasdale's third poetry collection, “Rivers to the Sea”, was published in 1915.  In 1916 Sara and her husband went to live in New York City, where they lived in Upper West Side on Central Park West.  In 1918, Sara won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1917 poetry collection “Love Songs”.

On 29th January 1933, Sara died after taking an over dose of sleeping tablets.   She was buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.

Award-winning British composer Chris O'Hara recently set Sara’s poem “There Will Come Soft Rains” to music for his commemorative work "Scars upon their Hearts”.  Other poems included in Chris’s work are “The Dancers” by Edith Sitwell, “Perhaps” by Vera Brittain and “Rouen” by May Wedderburn Cannan.

http://www.compositiontoday.com/chrisohara/

“There will come Soft Rains” by Sara Teasdale

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

https://femalewarpoets.blogspot.com/2018/02/chris-oharas-scars-upon-their-hearts.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Teasdale

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Flame_and_Shadow