Parenting & Family Quote by Sara Teasdale

Teasdale writes like someone making a pitch she both believes in and suspects you might refuse. "Life has loveliness to sell" opens with a marketplace metaphor that feels almost impolite in its pragmatism: beauty is not simply there, it is offered, and you have to choose to buy it. That single verb makes the poem less of a postcard and more of an argument against despair. Loveliness becomes a transaction requiring attention, time, and a willingness to be moved.

The images that follow are deliberately varied in scale and temperature: "blue waves whitened on a cliff" gives you cool, hard-edged sublimity; "soaring fire that sways and sings" shifts to heat and intimacy, the kind of domestic awe you can witness without traveling. Teasdale is stacking evidence, not decorating a page. The sonic lift of "sways and sings" turns the fire into a living thing, suggesting that enchantment isn’t passive scenery but something that meets you halfway when you’re receptive.

Then she lands on the most quietly devastating proof: "children's faces looking up, holding wonder like a cup". It’s not innocence as a virtue; it’s attention as a posture. Wonder is held, not owned, and the cup implies both fragility and practice: you can spill it, you can learn to carry it. In Teasdale’s early-20th-century context, shadowed by war, flu, and personal bouts of depression, the insistence is pointed. Beauty is plentiful; the scarce resource is our willingness to accept it.