Longing and Labor: Garden Memories from Sara Teasdale and Robert Frost

January 29, 2020

Today marks the anniversary of the death of American lyric poet Sara Teasdale, a luminous voice in early 20th-century poetry.

Born into privilege in St. Louis, Missouri, Teasdale’s poetry captures vivid emotional landscapes with tender simplicity. Awarded the Columbia Poetry Prize in 1918, later the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, her life ended tragically in 1933 in New York, a poignant close to a gifted poet’s journey.

Her poem The Garden resonates deeply with gardeners and dreamers alike, especially in these colder months when the earth rests beneath winter’s hush.

The garden becomes a metaphor for the heart—tired from autumn’s heaviness, yet filled with memories of vibrant springs past and fragile hope for those yet to come:

My heart is a garden tired with autumn,
Heaped with bending asters and dahlias heavy and dark,
In the hazy sunshine, the garden remembers April,
The drench of rains and a snow-drop quick and clear as a spark;
Daffodils blowing in the cold wind of morning,
And golden tulips, goblets holding the rain—
The garden will be hushed with snow, forgotten soon, forgotten—
After the stillness, will spring come again?

Teasdale’s delicate inquiry—“After the stillness, will spring come again?”—speaks to the gardener’s eternal question amidst winter’s silence, a moment suspended between memory and anticipation.

On this day in 1963, we also remember the death of the great American poet Robert Frost, whose earthy wisdom shaped much of 20th-century poetry.

Frost’s A Girl’s Garden, written in 1916, charmingly captures the innocent enthusiasm and earnest toil of a young girl’s first foray into gardening.

The poem celebrates simplicity, perseverance, and the unpredictable results of nurturing growth—whether in soil or spirit:

A neighbor of mine in the village
Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
And he said, 'Why not?'

In casting about for a corner
He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
And he said, 'Just it.'

And he said, 'That ought to make you
An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
On your slim-jim arm.'

It was not enough of a garden
Her father said, to plow;
So she had to work it all by hand,
But she don't mind now.

She wheeled the dung in a wheelbarrow
Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
Her not-nice load,

And hid from anyone passing.
And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
Of all things but weed.

A hill each of potatoes,
Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
And even fruit trees.

And yes, she has long mistrusted
That a cider-apple
In bearing there today is hers,
Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany
When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
A great deal of none.

Now when she sees in the village
How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
She says, 'I know!

'It's as when I was a farmer...'
Oh, never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
To the same person twice.

Isn't that sweet?

Both Teasdale and Frost, through their gentle reflections, invite us to cherish the garden as a mirror of our own hearts—weathering seasons, tending hope, and harvesting memories.