Sara Teasdale’s lyric voice is spare and songlike, and “Buried Love” shows that control clearly. The poem opens as a private funeral: “I have come to bury Love / Beneath a tree, / In the forest tall and black / Where none can see.” From the first stanza, grief is something hidden rather than shared. The speaker is not building a public memorial; she is choosing a dark, solitary place. Her central struggle is between the desire to move deliberately into joy and the knowledge that sorrow will follow her past the grave.
The poem is built from four short quatrains. The lines mostly alternate between three stresses and two, giving the verse the feel of a quiet folk song or ballad. The rhyme, too, is plain and sure: the second and fourth lines chime exactly—“tree” with “see,” “feet” with “bittersweet,” “cold” with “hold,” “blow” with “know.” That steadiness makes the speaker’s vows sound confident. Yet the confidence is being tested throughout.
Much of the poem works through negation. There will be “no flowers at his head,” no stone to mark the place, and no later visits to the grave. The speaker’s reason is compressed into one striking word: the mouth she loved “was bittersweet.” The word blends pleasure and pain, taste and touch, and it explains why she refuses the usual rituals of mourning. She cannot sentimentalize a love that left her with both sweetness and bitterness. The refusal to place flowers or a stone becomes a quiet anti-memorial. In ordinary grief, such objects help the mourner return and remember; here the speaker denies herself that ritual, perhaps because remembrance would keep reopening the bittersweet taste.
Teasdale deepens the burial imagery through the landscape. The “forest tall and black” is both a hiding place and a grave, and the woods later become “cold,” as if the emotional temperature has already fallen. The capitalized Love itself acts like a person: it has a head and feet and a mouth, so it can be buried, mourned, and then left behind. Yet there is no actual corpse, only the speaker’s feeling. This personification makes the act of moving on feel tangible, but it also shows that what she is burying is not outside herself; it is part of her own history.
The middle stanzas turn from burial to recovery, and the repeated phrase “I shall” gives them the force of a promise or a spell. The speaker says she will “gather as much of joy / As my hands can hold,” an image that is deliberately small and physical. Joy is not described as a permanent possession; it is something she can hold only in handfuls. That finite image also hints at limitation: she cannot gather all joy, only as much as her hands can hold, and a closed hand cannot reach for anything else. The final stanza moves into open daylight—“the sun” and “the wide winds”—but the dash after “blow,—” interrupts the release. The closing couplet is the poem’s most honest admission: “But oh, I shall cry at night / When none will know.” The brief “oh” cracks the controlled voice.
What makes “Buried Love” significant is its refusal to end neatly. The speaker does not pretend that burying love ends grief. Instead, she divides her life into a daytime performance of moving on and a nighttime return to tears. Secrecy frames the whole poem, from the grave “where none can see” to the weeping “when none will know.” The poem honors neither total despair nor easy recovery; it stays in the tense, truthful space between them.