Sara Teasdale’s lyric begins in a present so quiet it feels suspended: fields “sleeping in starlight,” a “velvet stillness” stretching to the “faint horizon.” From that hushed vantage, the speaker slips backward a year into a very different world, the “jangling city” where two people walked together “forgetful” of everything outside their own wonder. The poem’s central idea is not simply nostalgia for a lost walk, but the way a moment of love can imprint itself as a feeling of infinite possibility. In memory the ordinary city is transformed into an enchanted passage, and a shabby wharf sign becomes an opening onto “dreaming cities” that were never actually reached.
Teasdale builds the poem as a three-part movement: stillness, remembered movement, then imagined departure. It does not use a regular rhyme scheme, but it is held together by sound patterns and cadence. The opening phrase “velvet stillness” sets a soft, liquid mood, followed by the wide dip of “wide sown fields” and the whisper of “sleeping in starlight.” Then the remembered city arrives with abrupt auditory harshness: “jangling city,” “roaring in tumult.” The contrast is physical as well as emotional. Avenues become “rivers of light,” a metaphor that makes the walk feel both dangerous and dazzling. The streets narrow and knot; the crowd is “tense,” yet the couple moves through it “aloof, ecstatic, walking in wonder.” Those adjectives matter: the lovers are physically inside the crowd but imaginatively elsewhere, “unconscious of our motion.” The rhythm shifts to longer, winding lines during this crowded scene, as if the sentence itself is trying to move through the packed streets; then the repeated “Passed us and passed” pushes the anonymous faces past in a kind of trance.
At the heart of the poem is the speaker’s admission that she forgot the “foreign words and foreign faces” and retained only a feeling: “I only felt alive, defiant of all death and sorrow, / Sure and elated.” That feeling, more than any event, is “the gift you gave me.” The word “defiant” is crucial. Love here is not mere happiness; it is a resistance to mortality and grief. The speaker does not describe what was said or done. She describes a state of being, which makes the memory both intimate and strangely impersonal. The foreignness of the city—its dark, deep-seeing eyes, its lights and faces—blurs into a backdrop for that elation.
The final section turns on a sign. The streets grow “still more tangled” until they reach water “black and glossy,” flecked with faint lights. A “shabby building” carries the words “The India Wharf,” and the pair turns back. The word “shabby” works against the exotic promise of the name. In the real city, the wharf is ordinary, even disappointing; in the speaker’s imagination, it is a threshold. She says she always felt they “could have taken ship” and crossed “bright green seas” to “dreaming cities set on sacred streams / And palaces / Of ivory and scarlet.” The conditional “could have” keeps the voyage permanently unrealized, yet also permanently available. The poem ends not with arrival but with a shimmering list of colors and images, trailing off into “ivory and scarlet.” The imagined destination matters less than the capacity to imagine it.
What makes the poem significant is its ability to capture the afterlife of a moment. The present fields are still, the city is far away, and the companion is addressed only as “you,” yet the wharf still works on the speaker like a spell. Teasdale does not explain the relationship or its ending; she preserves the memory as a private mythology. A grimy urban sign becomes the entrance to an unshipped life. That is the poem’s power: it shows how love briefly makes the world feel limitless, and how memory, long afterward, keeps a door open in the mind even when the actual street has been left behind.