Paris in Spring

Paris in Spring

By Sara Teasdale

 

The city’s all a-shining

Beneath a fickle sun,

A gay young wind’s a-blowing,

The little shower is done.

But the rain-drops still are clinging

And falling one by one —

Oh it’s Paris, it’s Paris,

And spring-time has begun.

 

I know the Bois is twinkling

In a sort of hazy sheen,

And down the Champs the gray old arch

Stands cold and still between.

But the walk is flecked with sunlight

Where the great acacias lean,

Oh it’s Paris, it’s Paris,

And the leaves are growing green.

 

The sun’s gone in, the sparkle’s dead,

There falls a dash of rain,

But who would care when such an air

Comes blowing up the Seine?

And still Ninette sits sewing

Beside her window-pane,

When it’s Paris, it’s Paris,

And spring-time’s come again.

 

About Sara Teasdale

On August 8, 1884, Sara Trevor Teasdale was born in St. Louis, Missouri, into an old, established, and devout family. She was home-schooled until she was nine and traveled frequently to Chicago, where she became part of the circle surrounding Poetrymagazine and Harriet Monroe. Teasdale published Sonnets to Duse, and Other Poems, her first volume of verse, in 1907. Her second collection, Helen of Troy, and Other Poems, followed in 1911, and her third, Rivers to the Sea, in 1915.

 

In 1914 Teasdale married Ernst Filsinger; she had previously rejected a number of other suitors, including Vachel Lindsay.* She moved with her new husband to New York City in 1916. In 1918, she won the Columbia University Poetry Society Prize (which became the Pulitzer Prize for poetry) and the Poetry Society of America Prize for Love Songs, which had appeared in 1917. She published three more volumes of poetry during her lifetime: Flame and Shadow (1920), Dark of the Moon (1926), and Stars To-night (1930). Teasdale's work had always been characterized by its simplicity and clarity, her use of classical forms, and her passionate and romantic subject matter. These later books trace her growing finesse and poetic subtlety. She divorced in 1929 and lived the rest of her life as a semi-invalid. Weakened after a difficult bout with pneumonia, Teasdale died by suicide on January 29, 1933. Her final collection, Strange Victory appeared posthumously that same year.

 

* Vachel Lindsay was famous in the early 20th century as a traveling bard whose dramatic delivery in public readings helped keep appreciation for poetry as a spoken art alive in the American Midwest; he called these performances the “Higher Vaudeville.”