The Garden
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?
Words in this poem
- hazy a.
- Thick with haze; somewhat obscured with haze; not clear or transparent. [From Haze, n.]
- sunshine n.
- The light of the sun, or the place where it shines; the direct rays of the sun, the place where they fall, or the warmth and light which they give.
- stillness n.
- The quality or state of being still; quietness; silence; calmness; inactivity.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Garden is in the public domain. This text is taken from Flame and Shadow, Project Gutenberg ebook #591; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Sara Teasdale, The Garden, in Flame and Shadow (1920), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #591, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/teasdale-flame-shadow/the-garden.html, id L16988.
Form and metre
The Garden is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is iambic heptameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 71%). 87% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 12.4 syllables. 4 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in iambic heptameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 -A-A autumn · darkA · april · sparkA
- 2 -AAA morning · rainA · forgottenA · againA
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against iambic heptameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| My heart is a garden tired with autumn, | 10 | ····/˘/·/˘ |
| Heaped with bending asters and dahlias heavy and dark, | 13 | ··/˘/˘·/˘/˘·· |
| In the hazy sunshine, the garden remembers April, | 14 | ··/˘/··/˘˘/˘/˘ |
| The drench of rains and a snow-drop quick and clear as a spark; | 14 | ·············· |
| Daffodils blowing in the cold wind of morning, | 12 | /˘·/˘·····/˘ |
| And golden tulips, goblets holding the rain-- | 11 | ·/˘/˘/˘/˘·· |
| The garden will be hushed with snow, forgotten soon, forgotten-- | 15 | ·/˘·····˘/˘·˘/˘ |
| After the stillness, will spring come again? | 10 | ···/˘···˘/ |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.