By Heart: “Peace” by Sara Teasdale + New Kenyon “Let Evening Come” Challenge

I first discovered Sara Teasdale in an anthology titled All the Silver Pennies. And although Teasdale is one of Tweetspeak’s Take Your Poet to Work and School all-stars, I hadn’t spent much time with her. And then “Peace” popped up at Every Day Poems in early September.

Peace

Peace flows into me
As the tide to the pool by the shore;
It is mine forevermore,
It will not ebb like the sea.

I am the pool of blue
That worships the vivid sky;
My hopes were heaven-high,
They are all fulfilled in you.

I am the pool of gold
When sunset burns and dies,
You are my deepening skies;
Give me your stars to hold.

Only twelve lines, the poem rhymes in an abba, cddc, effe pattern. The rhythm itself ebbs and flows, just like the sea it describes. It seemed simple enough to learn by heart, even while on vacation. So Teasdale came west with me, her poem about the sea keeping me company in the mountains.

I always start by memorizing the last line, to know where I’m going. That meant the first line I learned was “Give me your stars to hold.” Which stars? The stars in Fort Davis, Texas, where the McDonald Observatory is located and where we spent our first night of vacation. The stars at night are indeed big and bright when you’re at 5,000 feet above sea level in a region known to be “hostile to trees,” according to the pamphlet I found at the cabin where we stayed.

From there, it was inevitable I would work my way through the poem backward. Next we traveled to Alamogordo, New Mexico, where my cousin took us to White Sands National Monument for a sunset picnic. What did it look like? It looked like this:

I am the pool of gold
When sunset burns and dies
You are my deepening skies

Driving through New Mexico over the next few days, often down deserted highways, we stared at skies so large they curved like waves — the same skies that inspired artist Georgia O’Keeffe, whose museum we visited and whose landscapes we traversed.

My hopes were heaven-high
They are all fulfilled in you

From there we traveled to my happy place, Colorado. We started in Creede, my mom’s happy place, which I wrote about in The Joy of Poetry. Each morning as I walked — temps in the 30s, elevation almost 9,000 feet — every aspen and cottonwood golden, I finally found water-filled peace, at the Rio Grande. Unlike the sea, it does not ebb. It only flows.

Peace flows into me
As the tide to the pool by the shore.
It is mine forevermore,
It will not ebb like the sea.

After so many miles traveled I’d still found no pool to reflect the blue sky. For that we had to push on to Estes Park, where autumn yielded to a foot of snow. But I knew where to find a pool of blue: Lake Estes. While we walked the 3.75-mile trail in the center of town, it snowed and snowed and snowed. Which, for this Texas gal, inspired something like worship.

I am the pool of blue
That worships the vivid sky

This was no ordinary vacation. It was our first time to revisit some beloved places after much loss. Just in case the experience didn’t feel peaceful, I thought it prudent to bring “Peace” along, tucking it into my jacket pocket so I would never be without it.

As I practiced the lines I moved my body with the rhyme scheme: in-out-out-in, out-in-in-out, in-out-out-in. It took actual flow to tuck peace in my heart, and with it, my own passel of stars to hold forevermore.

_______________

Your Turn

Did you memorize “Peace” this month? Join our By Heart community and share your audio or video using the hashtags #ByHeart and #MemoriesWithFriends and tagging us @tspoetry. We also welcome photos of your handwritten copy of the poem.

By Heart for December

For the next By Heart gathering, December 21, we’ll memorize Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come,” which is especially comforting if you find the holiday season to be heavy.

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

Photo by duncan johnston, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Megan Willome, author of The Joy of Poetry.

Browse more By Heart

“Megan Willome’s The Joy of Poetry is not a long book, but it took me longer to read than I expected, because I kept stopping to savor poems and passages, to make note of books mentioned, and to compare Willome’s journey into poetry to my own. The book is many things. An unpretentious, funny, and poignant memoir. A defense of poetry, a response to literature that has touched her life, and a manual on how to write poetry. It’s also the story of a daughter who loses her mother to cancer. The author links these things into a narrative much like that of a novel. I loved this book. As soon as I finished, I began reading it again.”

—David Lee Garrison, author of Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro

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