Sara Teasdale · 1915
Free to use in the UK and the US
I Shall Not Care
Sara Teasdale · 1915
When I am dead and over me bright April Shakes out her rain-drenched hair, Though you should lean above me broken-hearted, I shall not care. I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful When rain bends down the bough, And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted Than you are now.
Love Songs, Sara Teasdale, 1917. Project Gutenberg eBook #442, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/442/pg442.txt. The poem first appeared in Rivers to the Sea, 1915, and the 1917 collection is the text transcribed here.
Public domain in the UK and the US · serany.app
What Serany thinks about this poem
Background
Published in 1915, written out of an unhappy attachment rather than a bereavement. Teasdale won the first Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1918 and died by suicide in 1933. The poem is widely read at funerals for its first stanza and its title, which sound like acceptance when they are lifted away from the second.
Meaning
She is telling someone who treated her coldly that one day she will be past being hurt by it. When she is dead he can stand over her grave as upset as he likes and it will be too late to matter. The peace she describes is real but it is also a refusal: she will finally be colder to him than he was to her.
Who's it for
Read the whole thing before you choose it. Taken as a funeral poem it is often heard as serenity, and it is actually addressed in bitterness to one specific person who did not love her back. That can be exactly right: for a woman who was not treated well and whose family know it, said out loud at last, it is the truest thing in the library. For most services it is the wrong note, and the second stanza is why. Do not pick it for a much loved parent on the strength of the first four lines.
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