The Clear and Simple Way

A Winter Night

My window-pane is starred with frost,

The world is bitter cold tonight,

The moon is cruel, and the wind

Is like a two-edged sword to smite.

God pity all the homeless ones,

The beggars pacing to and fro,

God pity all the poor to-night

Who walk the lamplit streets of snow.

My room is like a bit of June,

Warm and close-curtained fold on fold,

But somewhere, like a homeless child,

My heart is crying in the cold.

Sarah Teasdale won the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1918. Although she was in love with the poet Vachel Lindsay who wrote her daily love letters (which must have been very poetical!) she married a rich businessman when she was 30. Because he was rich? I don't know. Anyway, they divorced. She committed suicide a few years later, and her old lover, the poet, killed himself two years before she did. But she did leave many poems. The one above also fits our world today, although my favorite Teasdale poem is called Stars.