Sara Teasdale’s eight-line lyric opens with a puzzle: why would anyone refuse “an hour so jewelled with delight”? The speaker first tries to account for the woman’s refusal by making her seem almost superhumanly rich. She must have inner “treasuries of joy” to draw on at any hour, or she must be “very sure of heaven,” so certain of a larger reward that one glittering hour cannot tempt her. These explanations arrive with the confident rhythm of a proverb: loose iambic tetrameter lines, with the exact rhymes of “delight” and “night,” give the opening a clean, settled music.
The confidence does not last. A dash after “heaven” turns the poem on its hinge, and the speaker’s next thought is smaller and colder: “Or is it only that she feels / How much more safe it is to lack / A thing that time so often steals.” Here the woman is not overflowing with better joys; she is protecting herself from loss. Time becomes a thief that steals repeatedly, and the only way to keep something safe is never to possess it. What first looked like spiritual abundance may actually be fear wearing the costume of wisdom. The central idea is exactly that unresolved possibility: renunciation can be noble self-command, but it can also be a defense against the pain of losing what one loves.
The poem’s structure deepens the shift. The first five lines repeat “She must be...” in three variations, as if the speaker is trying to build a case or persuade herself. The word “must” is important because it signals guesswork rather than knowledge; the speaker cannot see inside the woman and is inventing explanations for behavior that seems almost unnatural. The language of wealth—“rich,” “forego,” “jewelled,” “treasuries,” “draw on”—turns joy into capital that can be stored and spent. The word “jewelled” makes the hour tangible and precious, so the woman’s refusal feels all the more extreme. Then the dash and the word “only” shrink the scale. By the closing lines, the grand vocabulary of riches and heaven has been replaced by the defensive, muted words “safe” and “lack.”
Even the rhymes follow the poem’s argument. The first rhyming pair, “delight” and “night,” balances pleasure against darkness. The second pair, “feels” and “steals,” links emotional openness with the danger of theft. Those two final rhymes suggest that to feel strongly is to become vulnerable to time. The title, too, hovers between praise and irony. A “wise woman” might be someone who understands that attachment brings suffering, but Teasdale’s speaker raises the possibility that the woman is not so much wise as afraid. The poem refuses to decide which reading is true, and that refusal is what gives the lines their uncomfortable power.
What makes the poem significant is its economy and its moral complexity. In only eight lines, Teasdale turns a conventional virtue—detachment, the ability to say no to pleasure—into a psychological question. She does not mock the wise woman, but she also does not simply admire her. Instead, she leaves the reader with an unsettling thought: the safest way to live may protect the heart, but it may also leave it empty.