Sara Teasdale’s speaker turns the end of a love affair into a solitary funeral. She says she has come to bury Love beneath a tree in a tall black forest where nobody can see. The burial is deliberately bare: no flowers, no headstone. That lack of ceremony feels like a quiet refusal to honor the relationship, even though the line about the mouth she loved being bittersweet shows the love was real but painful.
The second half moves toward recovery. She says she will not return to the grave because the woods are cold; instead, she plans to spend her days in the sun, gathering joy. Yet the final lines admit the sunlight is not the whole story—at night, alone, she will still cry. The mood is restrained and melancholy, a portrait of grief that is hidden from others but not truly gone.