August Moonrise

August Moonrise

By Sara Teasdale

The sun was gone, and the moon was coming
Over the blue Connecticut hills;
The west was rosy, the east was flushed,
And over my head the swallows rushed
This way and that, with changeful wills.
I heard them twitter and watched them dart
Now together and now apart
Like dark petals blown from a tree;
The maples stamped against the west
Were black and stately and full of rest,
And the hazy orange moon grew up
And slowly changed to yellow gold
While the hills were darkened, fold on fold
To a deeper blue than a flower could hold.
Down the hill I went, and then
I forgot the ways of men,
For night-scents, heady, and damp and cool
Wakened ecstasy in me
On the brink of a shining pool.

O Beauty, out of many a cup
You have made me drunk and wild
Ever since I was a child,
But when have I been sure as now
That no bitterness can bend
And no sorrow wholly bow
One who loves you to the end?
And though I must give my breath
And my laughter all to death,
And my eyes through which joy came,
And my heart, a wavering flame;
If all must leave me and go back
Along a blind and fearful track
So that you can make anew,
Fusing with intenser fire,
Something nearer your desire;
If my soul must go alone
Through a cold infinity,
Or even if it vanish, too,
Beauty, I have worshipped you.

Let this single hour atone
For the theft of all of me.

About the Poem

There is something about an August evening that already seems to carry the faintest suggestion of an ending. Summer is still very much with us, but the days are growing shorter. Darkness comes a little earlier than it did only a few weeks before. There may still be hot afternoons ahead, but occasionally there is a coolness in the evening air that reminds us autumn is not so far away.

Sara Teasdale captures one of those evenings in “August Moonrise,” but what begins as a beautiful description of the natural world gradually becomes something much more profound. She watches the sun disappear, the moon rise over the hills, and swallows dart across the evening sky. The colors deepen from rosy pink to orange, gold, and finally a blue so intense that it is “deeper…than a flower could hold.”

For a moment, everything else disappears.

“Down the hill I went, and then / I forgot the ways of men,” she writes. I love that line. There are moments when we need to forget the ways of men for a little while. The world can be exhausting. People disappoint us. We disappoint ourselves. There are worries about tomorrow and regrets about yesterday. Sometimes we need an evening when the air is cool, the moon is rising, and the rest of the world can simply wait.

But Teasdale does not remain in that peaceful landscape. The beauty surrounding her makes her think about something much larger: the fact that she will eventually lose everything.

Her breath. Her laughter. Her sight. Her heart. Perhaps even her soul.

That sounds bleak, yet “August Moonrise” does not feel like a poem of despair. Teasdale knows that sorrow is unavoidable, but she refuses to believe that sorrow negates beauty. She writes:

“no bitterness can bend
And no sorrow wholly bow
One who loves you to the end”

There is tremendous hope in those words—not the hope that nothing bad will happen, but the knowledge that pain does not erase every beautiful thing that came before it.

We sometimes think happiness means reaching a place where nothing hurts anymore. Life rarely works that way. Joy and sorrow have an inconvenient habit of existing beside one another. We can grieve someone we have lost and still laugh at a memory of them. We can carry disappointment and still be stopped in our tracks by a beautiful sunset. We can have no idea what tomorrow will bring and still enjoy the moon rising tonight.

Perhaps that is enough.

Teasdale ends with two remarkable lines:

“Let this single hour atone
For the theft of all of me.”

Everything will eventually be taken from her, but she has had this hour. She has seen the moon rise. She has smelled the damp evening air. She has watched swallows crossing the sky. She has experienced beauty so completely that, for this moment at least, simply having been alive to witness it makes the eventual price of mortality seem worth paying.

We cannot hold on to an August evening forever. We cannot hold on to summer. We cannot hold on to youth, the people we love, or ultimately even life itself. Perhaps that is precisely why we should pay attention while they are here.

There will always be another worry waiting for us tomorrow. Tonight, perhaps, we can look up at the moon.

“August Moonrise” begins almost as a landscape painting. Teasdale establishes the scene through color and movement: blue Connecticut hills, a rosy western sky, darting swallows, black maples, an orange moon turning to gold, and hills deepening into blue.

Her imagery is unusually vivid, but it is not static. Everything is changing. The sun has already disappeared. The moon is rising. The swallows move unpredictably through the sky. Colors shift as daylight gives way to darkness. Even before Teasdale explicitly introduces mortality, she has created a world defined by transition.

The swallows are particularly effective. Teasdale compares them to “dark petals blown from a tree.” Petals are beautiful, but fallen petals also suggest impermanence. They have separated from the flower that produced them and are being carried away. The image quietly anticipates the poem’s later concern with everything that must eventually “leave me and go back.”

The poem’s major transition occurs with the lines:

“Down the hill I went, and then
I forgot the ways of men”

Until this point, the speaker has primarily been an observer. Now she enters into communion with the landscape. The “night-scents, heady, and damp and cool” awaken an almost ecstatic response. Beauty is no longer merely something she sees; it becomes something she experiences physically and spiritually.

Teasdale then directly addresses Beauty itself. By capitalizing the word, she transforms beauty from a quality into something approaching a divine presence. She has been “drunk and wild” on Beauty since childhood. The language resembles religious devotion, and by the poem’s end she explicitly declares, “Beauty, I have worshipped you.”

Yet her worship does not promise immortality. Teasdale entertains several possibilities for what follows death. Perhaps the individual is somehow remade into something new. Perhaps the soul continues alone through “a cold infinity.” Perhaps the soul itself simply vanishes.

She does not claim to know.

That uncertainty is important. The poem’s consolation does not depend upon certainty about an afterlife. Whatever awaits her—or does not await her—she knows that she has experienced beauty while she was alive.

This gives particular force to the final couplet. The “theft” is mortality itself: everything life gives us will eventually be reclaimed. Yet Teasdale asks that this one perfect hour of beauty “atone” for that loss.

It is an extraordinary exchange. One hour cannot literally compensate for death, of course. But poetry is not concerned with balancing an account. Teasdale is expressing the immense value of being fully present for even one moment of existence.

The poem therefore becomes less about death than about how to live in its presence. Mortality gives urgency to beauty. Because the moon will set, we should watch it rise. Because August will end, we should notice its evenings. Because our lives are finite, the moments when we truly see the world around us matter all the more.

About the Poet

Sara Teasdale was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1884 and became one of the most popular American lyric poets of the early twentieth century. Her poetry is known for its musical quality, emotional clarity, and frequent attention to love, beauty, nature, solitude, and mortality.

Her first collection, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems, appeared in 1907, followed by Helen of Troy and Other Poems in 1911. Her 1917 collection Love Songs received major recognition, including what is now regarded as an early form of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Although Teasdale’s poems often appear deceptively simple, their accessible language can conceal considerable emotional complexity. She frequently places moments of natural beauty beside loneliness, longing, loss, or an awareness of death. Rather than diminishing beauty, however, mortality often seems to intensify it. What is temporary becomes precious precisely because it cannot remain.

Teasdale died in New York City in 1933 at the age of forty-eight. Her poetry has endured in part because of her ability to express enormous emotions without elaborate language. She could take something as ordinary as watching the moon rise over distant hills and transform it into a meditation on beauty, sorrow, mortality, and what makes a life worth living.

In “August Moonrise,” she leaves us with a simple challenge: notice what is beautiful while it is still before us. Summer will end. The moon will set. Every perfect hour eventually passes.

But first, we get to experience it.

Pic of the Day

A Slow Start to Monday

It’s Monday again, and I did not want to get out of bed this morning. I slept fine, or at least I seemed to have slept well. Isabella still got me up at her usual 4 a.m., but after I fed her, I went back to bed—and, surprisingly, back to sleep. I slept for another hour and a half, which is very unusual for me.

Even after that extra sleep, I still did not want to get out of bed. Part of it, I know, is the beginning of a migraine. I have a meeting this morning that I really don’t want to put off, so I’m going to get through that and reassess how I’m feeling afterward. Hopefully, the migraine won’t amount to much and the extra sleep this morning helped rather than simply delayed the inevitable.

It’s not the most auspicious start to my work week, but hopefully things will get better as the day goes along. Sometimes Mondays just require a little more effort to get moving.

Have a great week, everyone!

Pic of the Day

There Is Still Room

“Then the master told his servant, ‘Go out to the roads and country lanes and compel them to come in, so that my house will be full.’”

—Luke 14:23

There is something beautiful about a table with room for one more person.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly uses meals to teach us about the kingdom of God. He eats with people others consider sinners. He sits at tables with people respectable society would rather avoid. He feeds crowds who have nothing to offer him in return. Again and again, the table becomes a place where the boundaries separating people begin to disappear.

In Luke 14, Jesus tells the Parable of the Great Banquet. A man prepares a great dinner and invites many guests. When everything is ready, he sends his servant to those who have been invited, saying, “Come, for everything is now ready” (Luke 14:17).

But the invited guests begin making excuses.

One has bought a field and needs to go see it. Another has purchased five yoke of oxen and wants to try them out. Another has just married. One after another, the expected guests decide they have something more important to do.

When the servant returns and reports what has happened, the master does something unexpected. He does not cancel the banquet. He does not sit at an empty table lamenting that the people he originally invited refused to come. Instead, he widens the invitation.

“The owner of the house became angry and ordered his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame’” (Luke 14:21).

These were people who could easily find themselves pushed to the margins of society. They were not necessarily the people anyone expected to see occupying places of honor at a great banquet. Yet suddenly they are being sought out and welcomed.

Then comes one of the most beautiful moments in the parable. After the servant does what he has been told, he returns and says, “‘Sir,’ the servant said, ‘what you ordered has been done, but there is still room’” (Luke 14:22).

There is still room.

Those four words offer a powerful message for LGBTQ+ Christians.

Many of us have encountered Christians who seem determined to convince us that there is no room for us. We may have been told that we can be Christian or LGBTQ+, but we cannot be both. Some have been told they may enter the church only if they hide who they are. Others have been welcomed through the doors only to discover that the welcome comes with conditions: you may sit among us, but you cannot marry the person you love; you cannot serve in certain positions; you cannot fully participate in the life of the church unless you become the person we think you should be.

Some LGBTQ+ Christians eventually find affirming congregations where they are welcomed wholeheartedly. Others struggle to find a church where they feel at home. Some remain connected to traditions they love even when parts of those traditions have made them feel unwelcome. Others have walked away from organized religion altogether after being hurt too many times.

But the people guarding the doors do not own the banquet.

God does.

That distinction matters.

The Parable of the Great Banquet is not specifically about LGBTQ+ people, and we should not pretend that it is. Jesus tells the story in a particular setting and for a larger purpose concerning God’s kingdom. Yet its vision of an abundant invitation speaks powerfully to anyone who has been made to wonder whether there is a place for them.

And LGBTQ+ history gives us a powerful example of what it can mean to go toward people whom others have abandoned.

During the darkest years of the AIDS crisis, gay men were dying while much of the world looked away. Some were rejected by their families. Some were shunned by churches that should have offered comfort. Fear and ignorance about HIV meant that there were even people who were afraid to touch those who were sick.

But others came closer.

Gay men cared for their friends, lovers, and partners. Lesbians became caregivers, advocates, and some of the community’s fiercest allies. Nurses and doctors offered compassion when compassion was desperately needed. Clergy, volunteers, friends, and sometimes strangers sat beside hospital beds, brought meals, held hands, embraced bodies others were afraid to touch, and stayed with men who might otherwise have died alone.

When I read the master’s command, “Go out to the roads and country lanes and compel them to come in, so that my house will be full” (Luke 14:23), I think of people like them.

They went toward the people others had abandoned.

They did not ask whether those suffering were respectable enough, righteous enough, or acceptable enough to deserve compassion. They saw someone who needed love, and they went to them.

In doing so, whether they understood their actions in religious terms or not, they demonstrated something profoundly Christlike. They showed what it means to refuse to leave someone outside simply because others have decided that person does not belong.

And perhaps one of the most powerful things they offered was something remarkably simple: human touch.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus touched people others avoided. When a man with leprosy approached Jesus and asked to be made clean, Jesus did not recoil from him. Matthew tells us, “Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man” (Matthew 8:3).

He touched him.

Before the healing is even completed in Matthew’s telling of the story, there is that extraordinary gesture. Jesus reaches toward someone others would have kept at a distance.

During the AIDS crisis, when fear caused so many people to withdraw, the hand that reached across a hospital bed became its own kind of testimony. The embrace offered to a dying man proclaimed something that hatred, fear, and rejection could not erase:

You are not untouchable.

You are not forgotten.

You are not alone.

There is still room for you.

There is another important lesson in the Parable of the Great Banquet. The people who are welcomed are not reluctantly allowed to occupy a few leftover chairs. The master sends his servant looking for them.

“Go out quickly,” he says in verse 21.

Then, when the servant reports that there is still room, the master sends him farther: “Go out to the roads and country lanes.”

The desire of the master is not for an exclusive table occupied only by the right kind of people. His desire is for a full house.

Too often, Christianity has been presented as though God’s table were extremely small. We have constructed fences around it and developed rules determining who is worthy to approach it. Christians have sometimes behaved as though God has entrusted us with a guest list and appointed us to stand at the door checking names.

Jesus gives us a very different picture.

The kingdom of God is a banquet, and God keeps sending the invitation farther outward.

That does not mean that nothing is asked of us. God’s grace calls us toward lives of faith, love, mercy, justice, repentance, and compassion. Jesus never teaches that following him requires nothing from us. But there is an enormous difference between being transformed by God’s love and being told that we must first transform ourselves into someone else’s idea of acceptability before God will love us.

Grace works the other way around.

We come because we have been invited.

We grow because we are loved.

And we learn to love others because we have discovered how extraordinary it is to be welcomed ourselves.

For LGBTQ+ Christians, believing that can sometimes require an act of faith. When enough people have told us that God rejects us, it can become difficult not to hear their voices when we think about God. Human rejection can begin masquerading as divine rejection.

But they are not the same thing.

Jesus tells us about a master who looks at an unfinished banquet and sends his servant farther outward because there are empty places that he wants filled.

Perhaps those of us who know what exclusion feels like are particularly well equipped to understand what that invitation means. We know what it is like to wonder whether there will be a chair for us. We also have examples from our own history of people who refused to leave others outside when the rest of society turned away.

We can follow their example.

We can go toward the person others avoid.

We can sit beside someone who feels alone.

We can offer the hand others are afraid to touch.

We can move over.

We can pull out another chair.

We can welcome the person standing hesitantly at the doorway.

And we can remind someone who has been told otherwise that God’s love is not a scarce resource reserved for a fortunate few.

When someone tells us that people like us do not belong at God’s table, we should remember something important:

It isn’t their table.

The invitation comes from God.

And there is still room.

Pics of the Day

Moment of Zen: International Cat Day

Happy International Cat Day! Whether they’re demanding breakfast at dawn, claiming the best spot in the house, or curling up beside us for a peaceful nap, cats have a wonderful way of bringing a little more joy and calm into our lives.

And, of course, no Moment of Zen would be complete without Isabella, quietly watching the world and reminding us to slow down and simply enjoy the moment.