I Am Not Yours

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love -- put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.

Background and Analysis of This Poem

Sarah Teasdale's I Am Not Yours was first published in her 1915 collection Rivers to the Sea, a book that helped confirm her reputation as one of the most lyrical American poets of the early twentieth century. The Academy of American Poets presents the poem among her public-domain works, while a digitised edition of Rivers to the Sea preserves the original collection context. Teasdale is often associated with love poetry, but her best poems are rarely simple declarations. They tend to tremble between longing and self-knowledge, and I Am Not Yours is one of the clearest examples of that tension.

The poem begins with a striking refusal: the speaker says she is not "yours", not lost in the beloved. Yet almost immediately, that refusal is complicated by desire. She is not lost, but she longs to be. This is the poem's central drama. The speaker does not reject love; she wants more complete surrender than love has yet produced. She is loved, and she recognises the beloved as beautiful and bright, but something in her remains separate. The ache comes from that gap between being loved and being wholly absorbed.

Teasdale's images of dissolution are delicate but intense. A candle lit at noon, a snowflake in the sea, a light lost in light: each comparison imagines the self disappearing into something larger. These are not violent images of conquest. They are images of vanishing through excess: too much sun, too much sea, too much light. The speaker does not wish to be diminished by love so much as overwhelmed by it, made part of a radiance greater than herself. Yet there is a quiet risk in that wish. To be lost in love may be ecstasy, but it may also mean the loss of boundaries, perception and independent selfhood.

The final stanza makes the desire more urgent. The speaker asks to be plunged deep in love, to have her senses put out, to be swept by a tempest. The movement from candle and snowflake to storm and wind changes the emotional temperature. What began as graceful longing becomes almost desperate. Love is imagined not as calm companionship, but as a force that can blind, deafen and carry the self away. Teasdale's lyricism softens the violence of the language, but does not erase it. The poem understands that romantic surrender can feel both beautiful and dangerous.

Teasdale's own biography gives the poem added resonance, though it should not be reduced to a diary entry. Born in St Louis in 1884, she became widely known for poems of love, beauty, loneliness and emotional intensity. The Poetry Foundation notes that she won the first Columbia Poetry Prize, later known as the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Love Songs in 1918. That public recognition is useful context because it reminds us that Teasdale's poems spoke powerfully to readers in her own time, even as later literary fashions sometimes treated her lyric directness too lightly. Her simplicity is not lack of craft; it is a chosen clarity.

For modern readers, I Am Not Yours remains compelling because it captures a feeling many love poems avoid: the desire to lose oneself and the stubborn fact that one has not. The speaker longs for absorption, yet her voice is precise, self-aware and unmistakably present. That contradiction gives the poem its pulse. It is a poem about wanting love to erase the boundary between two people, while also revealing how powerfully the self continues to speak from that very boundary. Teasdale leaves us with a taper in a rushing wind: fragile, exposed, and still burning.