Flame and Shadow (1920) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The
poet's fifth collection, published two years after she won the 1918
Pulitzer Prize, is a masterful collection of lyric poems meditating on
life, death, and the natural world. Somber and celebratory, symbolic and
grounded in experience, Flame and Shadow revels in the mystery of
existence itself. "What do I care, in the dreams and the languor of
spring, / That my songs do not show me at all?" Content to depict the
rhythms of nature, the songs of birds, and "the silver light after a
storm," Teasdale's poetry dissolves the poet's ego in order to access a
deeper well of creative energy: "For my mind is proud and strong enough
to be silent, / It is my heart that makes my songs, not I." In "There
Will Come Soft Rains," a poem born from a decade of war and widespread
disease, Teasdale imagines a posthuman world where beauty and harmony
continue despite our disappearance: "Robins will wear their feathery
fire / Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know
of the war..." For Teasdale, a poet who merges an abiding affection for
flora and fauna with a critical distance from human affairs, the belief
in the life of the world, with or without us, is enough. With a
beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this
edition of Sara Teasdale's Flame and Shadow is a classic work of
American poetry reimagined for modern readers.
