The title of Sara Teasdale’s “Appraisal” announces a form of assessment, and the poem delivers exactly that—an unsentimental inventory of a man’s flaws and virtues. Its opening commands, “Never think she loves him wholly, / Never believe her love is blind,” push against the romantic cliché that affection depends on ignorance. Instead, the speaker insists that a woman in love can see every defect and still choose the man. The poem becomes a balance sheet in which damaged goods are weighed against something of greater worth.
The first movement catalogues the man’s failures through homely indoor imagery. His faults are “locked securely / In a closet of her mind,” stored rather than denied. The image hints at both order and secrecy: she knows exactly where they are, and she keeps them close. His indecisions are folded “Like old flags that time has faded, / Limp and streaked with rain,” while his cautiousness hangs like “garments / Frayed and thin, with many a stain.” The words locked, folded, faded, limp, frayed, and stained turn moral weaknesses into worn cloth and old fabric. The move from faded public flags to frayed private garments also brings the poem closer to the man’s daily self. The faults are not monstrous, only shabby and tired, and the speaker can feel every frayed edge, yet she does not mistake the closet for a clean room.
The poem’s pivot arrives with the doubled plea “Let them be, oh let them be,” followed by the claim that “there is treasure to outweigh them.” From that point, the inventory shifts from liabilities to assets. The man’s “proud will” climbs “as surely as the tide,” a force both regular and unstoppable. His senses are “strained too taut to sleep,” an intensity that could be exhausting but is here valued as alertness. There is “gentleness to beast and bird,” a small concrete virtue that grounds the grander claims. The most striking image comes near the end: his humor is “flickering hushed and wide / As the moon on moving water,” a light that is not loud or steady but alive, changing, and difficult to pin down. Finally, the speaker names “a tenderness too deep / To be gathered in a word.” The very line break spills over, enacting the overflow of a quality language cannot quite contain.
Rhythm and rhyme give the poem a quiet, musing motion. End rhymes such as “blind” and “mind,” “rain” and “stain,” and “bird” and “word” create soft echoes, but the pattern is irregular; many lines run into the next, as if the speaker is thinking her way through the appraisal rather than reciting a set speech. Line lengths waver between four stresses and three, so the poem breathes unevenly, like someone weighing a difficult truth. The central image of the closet also unifies the poem: the faults are folded and put away, but they are not thrown out. They remain part of the man, and part of the woman’s knowledge of him.
What makes “Appraisal” significant is its honest model of love. The woman’s affection does not depend on blindness. She knows exactly what is threadbare in the man; she chooses him anyway because the vivid, tender qualities she treasures outweigh the worn ones. The poem refuses the claim that love must overlook faults. Instead, it suggests that a seeing love—one that opens the closet, examines the old flags and stained garments, and still finds treasure—is more honest, more generous, and perhaps more durable.