Night in Arizona -- Sara Teasdale

(Poem #1856) Night in Arizona The moon is a charring ember Dying into the dark; Off in the crouching mountains Coyotes bark. The stars are heavy in heaven, Too great for the sky to hold -- What if they fell and shattered The earth with gold? No lights are over the mesa, The wind is hard and wild, I stand at the darkened window And cry like a child. -- Sara Teasdale

      (1915)

One of my favourite things about Teasdale's work is her ability to blend the
external and the internal, to choose, time and again, precisely the right
words to both evoke a vivid sensory image and an intense feeling of empathy
with the poet's emotional reaction.

Today's poem is an excellent example - the deceptively simple and minimalist
description of the Arizona night is at once haunting and evocative; the
images just the right blend of universality and specificity that every word
triggers a flood of associations. The final two lines, far from begin an
abrupt intrusion of the first person "I" into an otherwise detached poem,
feel completely natural - the narrator has in some sense cast her presence
over the poem all along.

Like my favourite Teasdale poem, "Morning" [Poem #113], today's poem is
ultimately about the resonance between the poet's spirit and the sweep of the
world around her. When done right (and few people do it better than
Teasdale), this renders a poem both powerful and intensely memorable - not
just for the specific lines and phrases, but for a very individual 'feel'
which is hard to put into words, but which is indisputably present.

martin