I hoped that he would love me, And he has kissed my mouth, But I am like a stricken bird That cannot reach the south. For though I know he loves me, To-night my heart is sad; His kiss was not so wonderful As all the dreams I had.
On This Page: Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Related Poems
Summary
A woman has finally been kissed by the man she hoped would love her. She gets exactly what she wanted — and finds herself sad anyway. She compares herself to a bird that has been wounded and can no longer fly south for the winter.
In the second stanza, she explains the strange sorrow: it is not that he fails to love her, because he does. It is that the kiss itself, the real thing, could not match what she had imagined.
In eight short lines Teasdale captures one of the quietest and most universal of disappointments — the moment a longed-for thing arrives and turns out to be smaller than the dream of it.
Background
Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) was an American lyric poet, born in St. Louis and later settled in New York, known for short, musical, emotionally direct poems about love, longing, beauty, and death. “The Kiss” appeared in her second collection, Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911), in a sequence titled, fittingly, “Love Songs” — and the song-like simplicity of the form is no accident. Teasdale’s reputation rests on exactly this: clarity, plainness, and feeling delivered without ornament. A few years later, in 1918, the volume Love Songs would win her the Columbia Poetry Prize, the award that became the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
It is worth resisting the urge to read the poem too tightly against Teasdale’s biography, though the temptation is strong: she was courted by several men in these years, married in 1914, and struggled with depression for much of her life, dying by suicide in 1933. The poem does not need that story to work. But it does belong to a recognizable Teasdale temperament — one drawn again and again to the gap between what the heart imagines and what the world delivers.
Analysis and Themes
The easy reading of “The Kiss” is that a real kiss let the speaker down after she had built it up in fantasy. That is true, but it is only the surface. The poem is doing something more precise and more unsettling: it is not really about the kiss, or even about the man. It is about the kind of person for whom the dreaming will always be more vivid than the having — and about what it costs to discover that about yourself.
When the Dream Outshines the Kiss
Notice how carefully the poem rules out the ordinary reasons for sadness. He does love her — “though I know he loves me” — so this is not unrequited longing. The kiss happened; the wish was granted. The first stanza even marks the granting with a quiet “And” rather than a “but”: “I hoped that he would love me, / And he has kissed my mouth.” Everything she asked for has arrived. That is what makes the sadness strange and worth a poem. By stripping away every external cause, Teasdale isolates the real one, saved for the final two lines: the kiss “was not so wonderful / As all the dreams I had.” The disappointment is not in him. It is in the discovery that fulfillment is thinner than anticipation, that getting the thing dissolves the shimmer the wanting gave it. For a certain temperament, this is the central tragedy of desire.
The Stricken Bird
The poem’s one image carries its whole weight, so it repays a close look. She is “like a stricken bird / That cannot reach the south.” A migratory bird flying south is following its deepest instinct toward warmth and survival; a stricken one, wounded and grounded, will not make it and will die in the cold. So the simile is not simply “I feel sad.” It says that the very faculty that defined her — the longing that flew toward an imagined warmth — has been injured by the kiss. She reached her south, and arriving wounded the wing. The thing she dreamed toward turns out to be the thing that ends the dreaming. That is a far darker note than mild letdown, and Teasdale sounds it without raising her voice: the cost of getting what you long for may be the loss of the longing itself, which was, all along, the warmer country.
A Quiet Refusal of the Happy Ending
There is also something quietly bold in what the poem is willing to say. In 1911, the kiss from the beloved is supposed to be the happy ending of a woman’s story, the close of the romance. Teasdale takes that exact moment and reports, honestly and without apology, that it underwhelmed her. The speaker trusts her own interior life — her dreams, her disappointment — as more real and more worth recording than the romantic event she is expected to be thrilled by. The poem never blames the man or asks to be consoled; it simply states a private truth that the conventional script has no room for. That candor about a woman’s desire and its limits is part of why the small poem still feels alive rather than merely pretty.
Form and Technique
The poem is two quatrains rhyming abcb, in short iambic lines of mostly three beats — the plain, song-like measure of a folk ballad or a hymn. Coming from a section called “Love Songs,” it earns the name: the form is simple enough to be sung, and the simplicity is the technique, not the absence of one. There is exactly one figure of speech in the whole poem (the stricken bird) and not a single decorative word. That bareness mirrors the speaker’s flattened mood; a more ornamented poem could not have conveyed the deflation, because ornament is the opposite of being let down.
The structure withholds, then turns. The first stanza gives us the puzzle — kissed, yet stricken — and the mysterious simile, without explanation. The second stanza supplies the answer, and the turn between them works like the volta of a sonnet compressed into a song. The final stroke is one of diction: “not so wonderful” is deliberately mild, almost flat, and “dreams” lands as the last word in the poem, the largest thing in it left standing while the kiss shrinks beside it. The anticlimax is performed by the plainness of the language itself. Even the rhythm helps: the soft feminine ending of “love me” in the opening line gives the poem a faint sigh before it has said anything sad at all.
Notable Lines
Three moments carry the poem from granted wish to wound to the quiet truth behind it.
I hoped that he would love me,
Lines 1–2
And he has kissed my mouth,
The setup, and the small word that matters is “And.” The wish is granted, not denied; the line reports a success. Everything strange in the poem follows from the fact that nothing here has gone wrong by ordinary measures.
But I am like a stricken bird
Lines 3–4
That cannot reach the south.
The one image the poem stakes everything on. The wounded migratory bird names not a passing sadness but an injury to the very instinct for longing and flight — the dreaming faculty grounded by the arrival of the thing it dreamed of.
His kiss was not so wonderful
Lines 7–8
As all the dreams I had.
The closing turn and the poem’s heart. The understated “not so wonderful” does the work of a much louder confession, and ending on “dreams” lets the imagined outweigh the real even in the poem’s final breath.
Related Poems
If this poem stays with you, these three turn on the same discovery — that desire and its fulfilment are rarely the same size.
- The Look by Sara Teasdale: The natural companion, from the same 1911 volume and the same “Love Songs” sequence, where two men’s kisses are forgotten and only the one who merely looked still haunts the speaker — another poem about which longing outlasts which fulfilment.
- I Had Been Hungry, All the Years by Emily Dickinson: The same revelation rendered as a feast, where the speaker finally sits down to the meal she has craved and finds the hunger gone, the having somehow less than the wanting.
- Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats: The lover forever frozen an inch before the kiss, where Keats argues that desire stays perfect precisely because it is never fulfilled — the philosophy underneath Teasdale’s small lament.