Sara Teasdale’s lyric begins with a conditional that is also a refusal: “If I should see your eyes again, / I know how far their look would go—” and then follows that look through three remembered places. The speaker does not need the meeting to happen, because she already knows its emotional route. A morning in the park with “sapphire shadows on the snow,” oak trees in spring when the beloved “unloosed my hair and kissed,” and a mountain crest on “one diamond morning white with sun” rise up with the clarity of things kept too carefully. Each scene is luminous, and each is marked by a gem-like color: sapphire, amethyst, diamond. Yet the title’s meaning only fully opens in the final stanza, where those scenes are recognized as jewels the speaker must put away.
The poem’s construction supports that gradual recognition. Four quatrains move in mostly steady iambic tetrameter, eight syllables to a line, so the remembered images have a composed, almost processional rhythm. The rhyme is deliberately light: only “dun” and “sun” close one stanza with a full chime, while elsewhere the lines are held together more by alliteration and assonance — the sibilance of “sapphire shadows on the snow,” the w-sounds of “wild” and “white.” The dash after “go” acts like an open door; the sentence moves from the lover’s look into the first memory and then keeps returning to further scenes. The opening “your eyes” is answered by the final movement “turn my eyes from you,” so the whole poem turns on two rival kinds of vision.
The remembered scenes themselves are physical and intimate. In the second stanza the speaker recalls being kissed while her hair was undone: “you unloosed my hair and kissed / The head that lay against your knees,” while the “leaf shadow’s amethyst” encloses the moment in a jeweled half-light. The third stanza expands outward, to a “dun / Wild mountain” held under a “diamond morning,” where the wild landscape and the couple’s closeness seem part of the same brilliance. The repeated movement back — “Back to a morning,” “Or back to oak trees,” “still another shining place” — suggests that to look into the beloved’s eyes would be to reopen not one scene but a whole wardrobe of radiant moments.
What she refuses, then, is not remembrance itself but the act of wearing such radiance in the wrong season. The final simile is precise: “I will turn my eyes from you / As women turn to put away / The jewels they have worn at night / And cannot wear in sober day.” The word “sober” does the essential work here. It means daylight, clear-headed, restrained — the opposite of the night-world in which such glitter belongs. Love, or the memory of love, is too brilliant and too costly for ordinary use. By placing herself among “women” generally, the speaker turns a private decision into a shared feminine gesture of self-possession: knowing when something beautiful must be closed away.
That is the poem’s significance. It treats stopping oneself as an imaginative act, not a failure of feeling. The speaker knows exactly how far the look would go, and she still chooses to guard the present. The value of the past is not denied; it is classified. These are evening stones, not morning ones. The poem’s quiet power comes from that distinction, and from the way its own form — small, regular, restrained — performs the same control it describes.