Sara Teasdale’s “Faults” compresses a whole argument about intimacy into six short lines. The speaker receives a list of the beloved’s flaws, delivered by people who clearly expect their report to matter. Instead of denying the list or defending the beloved, the speaker laughs. That laughter is not cruelty; it is the sound of someone who has already absorbed every item on the list and found it irrelevant, even precious. The central idea is not that love is blind, but that love sees faults clearly and still transforms them into reasons for deeper attachment.
The poem is built from a single six-line stanza, and its rhyme scheme gives it a quick, almost epigrammatic snap. The first and fifth lines chime on “me” and “see,” while the second and third form the pair “one” and “done,” and the fourth and sixth close on “before” and “more.” Each line moves with four main stresses, creating a songlike terseness that suits a poem turning a public accusation into a private joke. The opening line establishes the situation flatly: “They came to tell your faults to me.” The word “came” suggests a little procession of informers, and “faults” sounds like a courtroom charge. “They named them over one by one” drags the list out, the phrase “one by one” slowing the line with repetitive, almost bureaucratic patience. Then the tone breaks: “I laughed aloud when they were done.” The word “aloud” matters because it is public, unembarrassed, a refusal to perform the expected shock or disappointment.
At the center of the poem sits the dash after “before” in the fourth line: “I knew them all so well before,--” The punctuation creates a pause, a held breath, and signals that the speaker is about to say something the informers cannot follow. The line also repeats the idea of prior knowledge: the speaker has known these “faults” longer and more intimately than the messengers. The next line calls the messengers “blind, too blind to see,” which flips the familiar cliché. Usually love is accused of blindness; here it is the outsiders who are blind. They can list a person’s flaws but cannot understand what the speaker sees in them. The repetition of “blind” intensifies the charge, and the word “see” links back to “me,” enclosing the speaker and the beloved inside a shared vision that the gossips lack.
The final line delivers the poem’s paradox with quiet force: “Your faults had made me love you more.” The shift from “laughed” to “love” moves the poem from social comedy to personal conviction. The verb tense is also telling: “had made” reaches back into the past, suggesting that this knowledge has already shaped the speaker’s long-standing affection. The word “more” is the poem’s key turn—not love despite the faults, not love ignoring them, but love increased by them.
Imagery is deliberately sparse, because the sounds and line lengths do much of the work. The only concrete picture is the group arriving and the speaker’s laughter; otherwise the poem exists in the language of judgment, knowledge, and vision. “Faults,” “blind,” “see,” “love”—these abstractions are yoked tightly to the speaker’s voice, so they feel less like philosophical terms and more like personal testimony. The contrast between “they” and “I” structures the whole piece: the plural outsiders speak against one person, while the singular speaker speaks for an intimate “you.” That “you” remains uncharacterized, which is part of the point. We never learn whether the faults are real or serious; the poem is not interested in defending the beloved. It is interested in the gap between public judgment and private tenderness.
What makes “Faults” significant is its compression and its confidence. In six lines it reverses a whole tradition of love poetry that either idealizes the beloved or laments imperfection. Teasdale’s speaker neither flatters nor apologizes; she simply claims that the supposed evidence against the beloved has become part of the bond. The poem remains memorable because its last line is not a sentimental flourish but a logical conclusion: if you truly know someone, even their faults can feel like a private possession, something no outsider can take away.