Love & Passion Quote by Sara Teasdale

Teasdale slides a knife into one of romance’s most protected myths: that being loved should be enough. The speaker isn’t starving for affection; she’s drowning in a quieter deprivation, the gap between certainty and sensation. “Though I know” opens like a legal clause, love reduced to evidence, as if she can prove his devotion in court but can’t make it sing in her body. That tension is the engine of the line: security arrives, and disappointment follows.

The heartbreak isn’t that the kiss was bad. It’s that it was ordinary. “Not so wonderful” is devastating in its restraint, refusing melodrama while admitting a private mutiny. Teasdale makes the dreams the real rival here. The speaker’s imagination has staged a more radiant intimacy than life can cash. Romantic culture teaches people to rehearse ecstasy in advance; Teasdale shows the invoice coming due.

Context matters: early 20th-century lyric poetry often treated love as either salvific or ruinous, and Teasdale, writing in an era when women’s desire was policed and sentimentalized, gives us a woman who doesn’t apologize for wanting more than devotion. The line also smuggles in a critique of heterosexual scripts: his love is stable, his kiss is a performance, and she measures it against an inner standard he can’t access. The sadness is less about him than about the loneliness of expectation - the private theater of “all the dreams I had,” now lit up by reality’s flat, unromantic bulb.