Longing — Summary

In Sara Teasdale’s “Longing,” the speaker makes a quiet distinction between two kinds of loss. She says she is not sorry that her soul will go unsatisfied, because the soul can live many times and has the depth and width of eternity to find fulfillment. What troubles her is her body. The body gets only this one brief life, and it will return to a “little drift of dust” without ever having known the joy it desired. The poem’s mood is tender and elegiac. The repeated line about not grieving for the soul sounds almost calm, but the turn at “But oh” lets real grief surface. The speaker can accept spiritual postponement, but she cannot accept the body’s permanent loss. The longing in the title is physical as much as emotional, and the poem mourns the earthly experience that death will cut off.