Those Who Love by Sara Teasdale

Painting by Frederic William Burton (1816-1900)

Hellelil and Hildebrand, The Meeting on the Turret Stairs

THOSE WHO LOVE

Those who love the most,
Do not talk of their love;
Francesca, Guinevere,
Deirdre, Iseult, Heloise,
In the fragrant gardens of heaven
Are silent, or speak if at all
Of fragile inconsequent things.

And a woman I used to know
Who loved one man from her youth,
Against the strength of the fates
Fighting in somber pride
Never spoke of this thing,
But hearing his name by chance,
A light would pass over her face.

Sara Teasdale

From Dark of the Moon.New York: Macmillan, 1926.

WHY THIS POEM?

I’m in a treehouse. With more than a dozen fellow college students.

This is no ordinary kids’ treehouse; this is a family home that just happens to be located 30’ in the air. We are convened in the living room of our philosophy professor’s funky residence at a cooperative artists’ community in Stony Brook, New York.

“The Land,” founded in 1954, was once the home of avant-garde composer John Cage, children’s book writer/illustrator Vera Williams, and others. Dwellings include several multi-room treehouses, irregularly-shaped huts made from recycled materials, and, perhaps because Cage and Buckminster Fuller were friends, a geodesic dome.

The goal for this spaghetti-and-wine evening is to collaboratively plan the syllabus for an interdisciplinary course on the Medieval and Early Renaissance period in Europe. The three Humanities professors who team-teach the course patiently take notes as each of us shares what we hope to study this term: Chaucer, Dante, DaVinci, the Crusades, the Black Death, the Medici family, the feudal economy, Gutenberg, Gothic architecture, Gregorian chant, the War of the Roses, monasticism, mead, courtly love . . .

The mention of courtly love inspires one of the professors to recite this poem. It’s like a teaser for all the tragic love stories from the Middle Ages that will fall open for us in the coming months.

As yet still more of a Romantic than a Feminist, I respond to the beautiful sadness of forbidden love and—to be honest—the thrilling notion of being a woman so desired that men would fight over her.

Since then, I have come to appreciate the poet’s point about the ineffability of love. I still believe in saying “I love you” (when it’s true) and I’m still a sucker for love poetry (Shakespeare, Yeats, Neruda, …), but I think Teasdale is right: Love does not require language. The cup of coffee I am drinking right now was prepared for me and brought to my bedside with a smile by my beloved, who said nothing. I was groggy and grumpy, wearing rumpled PJs, and my hair was sticking up in twelve directions. But when I looked up to take the cup from his hand, a light passed over his face.

THE POET

Frail and easily susceptible to illness, American poet Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) led a sheltered, often lonely life. She spent most of her childhood with adults, was home-schooled, and had a nurse companion for much of her life.

As a young woman, Teasdale was courted by fellow poet Vachel Lindsay,who ended the relationship because he felt he was too poor to support her. She married Ernst Filsinger in 1914 and seemed happy at first, but she became lonely when Filsinger traveled for business. She divorced him in 1929 and rekindled her friendship with Vachel Lindsay, who was by then married with children. Not long after, in 1931, Lindsay committed suicide. Two years later, lonely and worn down physically and emotionally after a serious bout with pneumonia, Teasdale ended her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills.

Though contemporary critics consider Teasdale something of a “lightweight,” she was appreciated in her lifetime for the musical lyricism and romantic subject matter of her poems. Her poetry collection Love Songs (released 1917) won three awards in 1918: the Columbia University Poetry Society prize, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and the annual prize of the Poetry Society of America.

 

THE POEM

On a first reading, “Those Who Love” seems to be a fairly simple poem. Teasdale states her main idea in the first two lines: “Those who love the most/Do not talk of their love.” Teasdale implies that words are inadequate to convey the deeply felt, complex emotion of true love.

However, to fully grasp the theme of this poem, it helps to understand Teasdale’s allusions to the tragic love stories of Francesca, Guinevere, Deirdre, Iseult, and Héloise. For hundreds of years, these cautionary but thrilling stories about the dangers of passionate love were told and retold across Europe. Parallels in these medieval romances are easy to chart. In each case:

The woman falls in love with the “wrong” man—someone she is forbidden, by society’s rules, to love.

The female’s act of loving threatens to de-stabilize society because it is a transgression against religious dictum and/or a violation of cultural norms. Francesca loves her husband’s brother. Guinevere, Deirdre, and Iseult, who are betrothed to rulers, each fall in love with the best friend and trusted ”right-hand man” of their future husbands. Héloise falls in love with a cleric.

There’s a secret love triangle that prohibits open declarations of love.

Dante records the actual history of Francesca da Polenta, Giovanni Malatesta, and his handsome brother Paolo. The well-known known legend involving Guinevere, King Arthur, and his knight Lancelot is thought to have been inspired by earlier tales about the love triangle of Iseult, King Mark, and his nephew Tristan, which, in turn, were inspired by the Irish legend of “Deirdre of the Sorrows” in the Ulster Cycle, which tells the dramatic tale of Deirdre, King Conchubar (Conor), and his warrior Naoise (Neesha). In the case of Héloise, the third party is not another man. She is denied an open relationship with Abelard because, in the eyes of the church, he is already in a relationship with God.

The woman pays a serious price—she dies or is removed from society—when her feelings become known.

Francesca is murdered; Guinevere and Héloise end up in convents, segregated away from men; Deirdre and Iseult bring about their own deaths out of grief. Clearly, if these stories tell the truth (and they have resonated with listeners and readers for centuries), talking about who you love most can be dangerous—especially for women.

Teasdale’s’ medieval exemplars of “Those who love the most” highlight the historical ways that politically-arranged marriages and the power of the church forced some women to try to keep their true love a secret. She draws attention to women’s suffering under these constraints by listing the historical characters—Francesca and Héloise—first and last in her list. Like bookends, their real life stories bracket the larger-than-life legends featuring Guinevere, Deirdre, and Iseult. Together, these five allusions set up the second verse, in which Teasdale tells us about a contemporary of hers who also suffered for true love. She alludes to a woman she “used to know/Who loved one man from her youth.”

It’s possible—and somewhat tempting— to interpret the poem in the context of Teasdale’s biography. Perhaps she saw herself as a romantic heroine who was forced to keep her true feelings under wrap and marry Ernst because Vachel was considered unsuitable. Perhaps the woman she “used to know” is her younger, happier self. Whether the lines are autobiographical or not, the poem raises questions about the ways societal norms constrain relationships and force lovers to suppress feelings that others may find inappropriate.

The final image makes it clear that the poet empathizes with women whose passionate desires must remain unvoiced. She describes the unknown woman’s face as beaming with light, silently revealing feelings that cannot be publicly acknowledged in words. This positive image of a woman’s face suffused with light calls to mind medieval paintings of saints who sacrificed their lives for the love of Christ. The idea that women who suffered for their passionate love are like saints who suffered for their spiritual love is underscored by the reference to the poem’s heroines walking “in the fragrant gardens of heaven.”

This is striking, because, in The Inferno, Dante describes Francesca as condemned to eternal damnation in the second circle of hell. Teasdale, presumably seeing her as wrongly punished, places her in heaven. Society may regard passionate love as disruptive or transgressive, but, for this poet, passionate love is a virtue, not a sin.

This poem’s fourteen line structure is evocative of the traditional love sonnet in which lovers, usually male, declared their passionate feelings for a beloved. Teasdale pares down this poetic form, shortening the lines and eliminating rhyme, subverting reader expectations with a very different “love poem” that serves as a carefully composed and subversive polemic. Critics who regarded Teasdale’s poetry as “lightweight” apparently failed to recognize that this short, delicate poem with its airy images of medieval women strolling in heavily scented gardens in fact carries significant weight. “Those Who Love” contains a bold protest against the societal norms that unfairly restrict women’s freedom to act on—or even speak of—their deepest feelings. 

In a time when right-wing religious zealots are actively seeking to control who can love whom, Teasdale’s poem serves as a reminder that denying people the right to express love ultimately will not work.  Love cannot be suppressed or made invisible just by silencing lovers. Society may attempt to contain love within certain “acceptable” boundaries, but Love is Light. It will shine through in the faces of “Those Who Love.”