Hello and welcome to the daily poem. I'm Heidi White, and today I'm going to read for you a poem

called The Answer by Sarah Teesdale. When I go back to earth and all my joyous body

puts off the red and white that once had been so proud, If men should pass above with false and feeble pity,

my dust will find a voice to answer them aloud. Be still. I am content. Take back your poor

compassion. Joy was a flame in me too steady to destroy. Live as a bending reed, loving the storm that

sways her, I found more joy and sorrow than you can find in joy. Sarah Teesdale was an American

poet. She lived from 1884 to 1933 when she died by suicide. Teesdale was an early

feminist poet, and she wrote a lot about what it means to be a woman. She explored her experience

of her femininity in a male-dominated world. And three of the major themes of her poetry are beauty, love, and death.

And in fact, I would posit that love and death are maybe the two great themes in poetry,

because they are the two great mysteries of the human condition.

What does it mean to love and be loved? What questions that are? They are the two great mysteries of the human condition.

What does it mean to love and be loved?

What questions does that answer for us?

How does the experience of love manifest itself in a complicated world?

And then secondly, death, which is the theme of this poem, how can we live a vibrant, nuanced, fully alive human life,

knowing that the only absolute fact of human existence is that someday it will end?

That is a very great mystery that every human being has to grapple with at some point.

And she certainly grapples with it in this poem.

This is a two stanza poem.

It's short, as you heard.

And the first stanza describes the narrator is dead and buried in the ground, and there

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