In Sara Teasdale’s “Change,” the speaker asks someone she once loved to look away from the person she has become. Instead, she wants him to keep an earlier image of her: a “laughing shadowy girl” standing at midnight by a flowering tree, her eyes bright with love and starlight. She also asks him to remember “the muted laughter” of their one year of youth together, the only youth either of them truly knew. The poem feels bittersweet and slightly haunted. The speaker is not really telling him to stay away out of anger; she is afraid of being seen as time has changed her. She would rather live in his memory as beautiful and young than be confronted with what the passing years have done. The repeated phrase “Turn from me now” carries both tenderness and sadness, as if memory is the only place where their love can remain untouched.
Change — Summary
Remember me as I was then; Turn from me now, but always see The laughing shadowy girl who stood At midnight by the flowering tree, With eyes that love had made as bright As the trembling stars of the summer night.
Turn from me now, but always hear The muted laughter in the dew Of that one year of youth we had, The only youth we ever knew-- Turn from me now, or you will see What other years have done to me.