"There's nothing half so real in life as the things you've done... inexorably, unalterably done"
About this Quote
Teasdale turns the ordinary moral of “actions have consequences” into something colder and more intimate: a theory of reality built out of irreversibility. “Half so real” is a sly comparative, suggesting that most of what we call “real life” - our plans, self-stories, even our feelings - is vapor next to the blunt fact of what we have already done. The ellipsis works like a swallow in the throat, a pause where the mind tries to bargain, before the phrase locks shut.
“Inexorably, unalterably done” is the engine of the line. Those adverbs don’t decorate; they sentence. They imply not just permanence but the futility of revision, the impossibility of editing the past into something kinder. Teasdale isn’t romanticizing action as heroic agency. She’s naming the specific horror (and clarity) of the completed act: once it exists, it becomes a fixed object in the world, immune to our later reinterpretations.
The subtext is psychological, almost legalistic. It reads like a verdict delivered by the self to the self: desire and intention can plead their case, but the record is the record. For an early-20th-century poet often read for lyric tenderness, the line’s severity is the point. Written in an era shadowed by war and tightening social scripts around women’s choices, it carries a quiet pressure: your life will be measured less by what you meant and more by what you enacted. Reality, Teasdale suggests, is not what happens to you; it’s what you leave behind that can’t be taken back.
“Inexorably, unalterably done” is the engine of the line. Those adverbs don’t decorate; they sentence. They imply not just permanence but the futility of revision, the impossibility of editing the past into something kinder. Teasdale isn’t romanticizing action as heroic agency. She’s naming the specific horror (and clarity) of the completed act: once it exists, it becomes a fixed object in the world, immune to our later reinterpretations.
The subtext is psychological, almost legalistic. It reads like a verdict delivered by the self to the self: desire and intention can plead their case, but the record is the record. For an early-20th-century poet often read for lyric tenderness, the line’s severity is the point. Written in an era shadowed by war and tightening social scripts around women’s choices, it carries a quiet pressure: your life will be measured less by what you meant and more by what you enacted. Reality, Teasdale suggests, is not what happens to you; it’s what you leave behind that can’t be taken back.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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