Rivers to the Sea

Love, Longing, Solitude, and Mortality in Clear, Emotionally Candid American Lyric PoetryBy Sara Teasdale
Listen with Sir Michael Caine™ and 1,000+ voices
Length1h 31m

About this audiobook

Published in 1915, Sara Teasdale's Rivers to the Sea is a carefully shaped collection of lyric poems in which intimate emotion meets the recurrent imagery of water, landscape, music, and seasonal change. Teasdale writes with graceful clarity, using regular rhythms, melodic rhyme, and compressed stanzaic forms to explore love, solitude, desire, transience, and the consolations—and limits—of beauty. The river functions both as a natural image and as a governing metaphor for emotional movement: individual experience flows toward time, memory, and mortality. Situated within the early twentieth-century tradition of American lyric poetry, the volume retains echoes of Romanticism and fin-de-siècle aestheticism while anticipating the more personal, psychologically candid poetry of modernity. Born in St. Louis in 1884, Teasdale emerged as one of the most accomplished American poets of her generation. Her refined musicality and inward subject matter were shaped by a life marked by physical delicacy, intense emotional attachments, and an enduring sensitivity to solitude and natural beauty. Rivers to the Sea reflects her commitment to poetic craftsmanship and to making private feeling universally intelligible without sacrificing elegance or restraint. This volume is especially rewarding for readers interested in women's literary history, American poetic modernism, and the continuing possibilities of the songlike lyric. It offers an accessible yet intellectually substantial encounter with a poet whose apparent simplicity conceals emotional complexity, formal discipline, and a profound meditation on love, loss, and the passage of life.

Audiobook details

Rating★★★★ 4.2 (230)
Includes Goodreads
GenrePoetry
Length1 hr 31 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateNov 24, 2023
LanguageEnglish

Table of contents

1Poems of Nature (Annotated)
26JOY
2PART I
27IN A RAILROAD STATION
3PART III
28IN THE TRAIN
4PART IV
29TO ONE AWAY
5PART V
30SONG
Show all chapters
6SPRING NIGHT
31DEEP IN THE NIGHT
7THE FLIGHT
32THE INDIA WHARF
8THE LOOK
33I SHALL NOT CARE
9SPRING
34DESERT POOLS
10THE LIGHTED WINDOW
35LONGING
11THE KISS
36PITY
12THE OLD MAID
37AFTER PARTING
13FROM THE WOOLWORTH TOWER
38ENOUGH
14AT NIGHT
39ALCHEMY
15THE YEARS
40FEBRUARY
16PEACE
41MORNING
17APRIL
42MAY NIGHT
18COME
43DUSK IN JUNE
19APRIL SONG
44LOVE-FREE
20MAY DAY
45SUMMER NIGHT, RIVERSIDE
21CROWNED
46IN A SUBWAY STATION
22TO A CASTILIAN SONG
47AFTER LOVE
23BROADWAY
48DOORYARD ROSES
24A WINTER BLUEJAY
49A PRAYER
25IN A RESTAURANT
50INDIAN SUMMER

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