Sara Teasdale’s eight-line lyric “An End” is a small, cold room of a poem. It opens not with the moment of loss but with its aftermath: the speaker has already said good-bye to what she loves, and now she stands in a rainy September day watching the last of the season leave. The central idea is as startling as it is bleak: she is not the victim of separation but its agent. “With my own will I vanquished my own heart,” she says, and the phrase turns self-control into self-betrayal. To conquer a heart is usually a victory; here the conquered heart is her own, so the triumph has no winner.
The imagery makes the emotional state visible. September is “drenched” and personified as a guest who “turns to depart,” so the outer world appears to be leaving with the beloved. Rain falls against window panes that are “cold and blind,” a phrase that suggests both blank glass and a refusal of sight. On the “long wind” the speaker hears winter before it arrives, which is exactly how dread works: the future is felt before it happens. The seasonal vocabulary—summer, September, winter—does more than decorate the poem. It turns an inner decision into a change of climate. Summer is not simply over; it has been dismissed. “With my own will I turned the summer from me,” the speaker insists, and then the final line closes the door: “And summer will not come to me again.” The repetition of “summer” at the line’s beginning and end makes the loss feel absolute.
The construction mirrors that finality. Two quatrains share a mostly iambic movement, but the rhythm is interrupted by pauses, especially around “good-bye,” so the voice sounds as if it is keeping itself steady against grief. The rhyme is deliberately partial: “depart” answers “heart” in the first stanza, and “rain” chimes with “again” in the second, while the other line endings go unrhymed. This leaves a faint, unfinished music, as if the poem itself cannot fully close. Key words are repeated with purpose. “Heart” appears twice in the first stanza—first as the capacity for joy, then as the thing defeated. “Own will” appears in both stanzas, binding the two actions together. The first willful act is in the past tense, “vanquished”; the second is also past, “turned”; then the final line shifts into future and negation: “summer will not come to me again.” That movement from accomplished act to permanent consequence gives the poem its quiet force.
What makes “An End” significant is its refusal to console. It does not blame fate, time, or another person. It leaves the exact cause unnamed, which makes the feeling transferable to any deliberate renunciation—a breakup, a farewell, a sacrifice made for principle. The speaker has won the argument with her own desire, and the prize is numbness. Teasdale, an American lyric poet known for compressed musical verse, works here with almost no ornament. Every word—drenched, depart, blind, turned—carries weight. The poem matters because it captures the precise moment when resolve becomes regret, not through weeping but through cold, clear language. It shows that an ending chosen by the will can still be mourned by the heart.