Strephon kissed me in the spring, Robin in the fall, But Colin only looked at me And never kissed at all. Strephon’s kiss was lost in jest, Robin’s lost in play, But the kiss in Colin’s eyes Haunts me night and day.
On This Page: Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Related Poems
Summary
The speaker has been kissed by two men — Strephon in spring, Robin in autumn — and looked at, but never kissed, by a third, Colin.
In the second stanza she weighs the three. The two real kisses meant little; they were thrown away in joking and play and have faded from her. But Colin’s look, the kiss he never gave, is the one thing she cannot shake: it haunts her night and day.
In eight light, song-like lines, Teasdale arrives at a small, sharp paradox — that the glance she never acted on outlasts the kisses she did, and that the most powerful thing here is the one that never happened.
Background
Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) was an American lyric poet known for short, clear, musical poems about love, longing, and loss. “The Look” comes from her 1911 collection Helen of Troy and Other Poems, in the same “Love Songs” sequence as its close companion, “The Kiss.” A few years later, the volume Love Songs (1917) would win her the Columbia Poetry Prize, the award that became the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
One detail unlocks the poem’s tone. Strephon, Colin, and Robin are not random men; they are conventional names for shepherd-lovers in the long tradition of English pastoral poetry, the world of Spenser and Sidney where idealized swains court idealized maidens. By borrowing those stock names, Teasdale signals that this is a stylized love-song, not a diary entry about three real suitors. The pastoral costume lets her say something quite serious about desire while keeping the surface as light as a folk tune.
Analysis and Themes
For such a slight poem, “The Look” makes a precise and almost philosophical claim about how desire works. Its whole effect rests on a reversal: it sets up an expectation that kisses are what count, then quietly overturns it, leaving a glance more potent than two embraces. Reading it well means seeing why the thing that never happened is the thing that lasts.
Two Kisses, One Look
The poem is built as a triad with a twist. Three men, two seasons of kissing, and then a third who breaks the pattern: “But Colin only looked at me / And never kissed at all.” That “only” sounds at first like a lack — Colin did less than the others. The second stanza reveals it was more. The title itself has already tipped the poem’s hand: the poem is called “The Look,” not “The Kiss,” and the central event turns out to be a glance, not an embrace. Teasdale arranges the whole thing so that the reader expects the kisses to matter and discovers, in the last two lines, that the one man who held back is the one who stayed.
What Is Spent and What Is Kept
The hinge of the poem is the verb “lost,” used twice: “Strephon’s kiss was lost in jest, / Robin’s lost in play.” Those kisses were real, but casual — given lightly, in fun, and so spent and gone. They had their moment and used it up. Colin’s look was never acted on, never cashed in, and so it never got spent; it remains, charged and intact, precisely because nothing was done with it. The poem quietly argues that fulfilment dissipates desire while restraint preserves it: what is expressed is discharged, what is withheld keeps its full voltage. The most erotic thing in the poem is the thing that stayed unspoken, and Teasdale ends not on “lost” but on “Haunts” — the unconsummated look doing what the consummated kisses could not, which is to last.
The Mirror of “The Kiss”
“The Look” belongs beside its sister poem from the same sequence, “The Kiss,” and the two together state one of Teasdale’s deepest convictions from both sides. In “The Kiss,” a longed-for kiss finally arrives and disappoints, because the dream was larger than the deed. In “The Look,” a kiss never arrives and endures forever, because nothing reduced it to mere fact. Fulfilment lets her down; non-fulfilment haunts her. Read as a pair, they describe a single law of desire as Teasdale understood it: the imagined and the withheld outshine the actual, and the heart is most faithful to what it never quite had. That she could render so unconsoling an idea in lines this light and singable is the quiet mastery behind both poems.
Form and Technique
The poem is two quatrains rhyming abcb in short iambic lines of about three beats — the plain ballad or hymn measure, the same song-like form Teasdale favours. The opening even borrows the structure of a folk catalogue or counting-rhyme: this one in the spring, that one in the fall, a tidy, countable list. That lightness is a setup. A catalogue invites you to read briskly, expecting more of the same, which is exactly why the turn in the second stanza lands so hard when the tone suddenly deepens.
The technique is one of balance and reversal. The parallel construction — “Strephon’s kiss was lost in jest, / Robin’s lost in play” — lines the two forgettable men up side by side and dismisses them in the same breath, so that the single word “But” can swing the whole poem toward Colin. Sound does the rest. The brisk short lines and bright rhymes (fall / all, play / day) carry the first seven lines along like a tune, and then the final line, “Haunts me night and day,” slows and darkens, the long vowels holding the close open. The poem is almost an epigram — a complete argument about desire delivered in twenty-eight words — and its power comes from saying something heavy in the lightest possible voice.
Notable Lines
Three moments carry the poem from its catalogue of kisses to the glance that undoes it.
But Colin only looked at me
Lines 3–4
And never kissed at all.
The pivot of the first stanza. “Only” and “never” make Colin sound like the man who did the least, setting a trap the second stanza will spring: the one who did nothing turns out to have done the most.
Strephon’s kiss was lost in jest,
Lines 5–6
Robin’s lost in play,
The two real kisses, dispatched in a single balanced breath. The repeated “lost” tells you everything: given casually, they were spent casually, and nothing of them survived.
But the kiss in Colin’s eyes
Lines 7–8
Haunts me night and day.
The close, and the poem’s whole point. “The kiss in Colin’s eyes” was never a kiss at all, only a look — yet it is the one that endures, because it was never spent. The poem ends on “Haunts,” the opposite of “lost.”
Related Poems
If this poem stays with you, these three turn on the same truth — that what is never consummated can outlast what is.
- The Kiss by Sara Teasdale: The companion and mirror, from the same 1911 volume and “Love Songs” sequence, where a longed-for kiss finally arrives and disappoints — the exact inverse of the look that lasts precisely because it was withheld.
- First Love by John Clare: A love that strikes entirely through a single silent, paralyzing look and never lets the speaker go, the glance-that-haunts rendered at full Romantic intensity.
- Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats: The lover forever frozen an inch before a kiss never taken, where Keats argues that desire stays perfect exactly because it is never fulfilled.