Collected Poems, 1930–1973
By May Sarton
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About this ebook
From the very beginning of May Sarton’s career, in her fiction, memoir, and poetry, her work has been touched by a deep sense of order. The careful structure of her work provides an elegant backdrop against which her emotions are free to unfold, rising up through the cracks and fissures of her poems’ architecture only to pass through and disappear like a summer thunderstorm. The author’s search for reason, love of nature, and diverse passions are on full display in this masterful collection, illustrating why May Sarton is considered one of the twentieth century’s finest literary minds.
May Sarton
May Sarton (1912–1995) was born on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. Her novels A Shower of Summer Days, The Birth of a Grandfather, and Faithful Are the Wounds, as well as her poetry collection In Time Like Air, all received nominations for the National Book Award. An accomplished memoirist, Sarton came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton spent her later years in York, Maine, living and writing by the sea. In her last memoir, Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992), she shares her own personal thoughts on getting older. Her final poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994. Sarton died on July 16, 1995, in York, Maine.
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Collected Poems, 1930–1973 - May Sarton
Collected Poems
1930–1973
May Sarton
Contents
Publisher’s Note on Poetry
Encounter in April (1930–1937)
First Snow
She Shall Be Called Woman
Strangers
Inner Landscape (1936–1938)
Prayer before Work
Architectural Image
Understatement
Summary
Address to the Heart
Memory of Swans
After Silence
Canticle
From Men Who Died Deluded
Afternoon on Washington Street
Winter Evening
A Letter to James Stephens
The Lion and the Rose (1938–1948)
Monticello
Charleston Plantations
Where the Peacock Cried
In Texas
Boulder Dam
Colorado Mountains
Of the Seasons
Meditation in Sunlight
Difficult Scene
The Window
The Lion and the Rose
Indian Dances
Santos: New Mexico
Poet in Residence:
The Students
Campus
Before Teaching"
After Teaching
Place of Learning
The Work of Happiness
After a Train Journey
O Who Can Tell?
The Clavichord
Song: Now let us honor with violin and flute
In Memoriam
Now Voyager
My Sisters, O My Sisters
The Lady and the Unicorn
Question
Perspective
Return
O Saisons! O Chateaux!
These Pure Arches
We Have Seen the Wind
Homage to Flanders
The Sacred Order
What the Old Man Said
Navigator
Who Wakes
Return to Chartres
To the Living
The Tortured
The Birthday
The Leaves of the Tree (1948–1950)
Myth
Song without Music
The Swans
The Second Spring
Kot’s House
To an Honest Friend
Landscape Pursued by a Cloud
Evening Music
Lullaby
Islands and Wells
Boy by the Waterfall
Poets and the Rain
Winter Grace
The Land of Silence (1950–1953)
The First Autumn
The Sacred Wood
Summer Music
As Does New Hampshire
Transition
Villanelle for Fireworks
Provence
Journey by Train
Evening in France
From All Our Journeys
Where Warriors Stood
Take Anguish for Companion
Innumerable Friend
The Caged Bird
The Land of Silence
Letter to an Indian Friend
Of Prayer
The Tree
A Light Left On
Because What I Want Most is Permanence
Song: This is the love I bring
Leaves before the Wind
In a Dry Land
Prothalamion
Kinds of Wind
The Seas of Wheat
These Images Remain:
Now that the evening gathers up the day
Even such fervor must seek out an end
So to release the soul, search out the soul
The rose has opened and is all accomplished
But parting is return, the coming home
The stone withstands, but the chisel destroys
What angel can I leave, gentle and stern
These images remain, these classic landscapes
Here are the peaceful days we never knew
Without the Violence
Humpty Dumpty
Giant in the Garden
Journey toward Poetry
Italian Garden
Letter from Chicago
On a Winter Night
Now I Become Myself
In Time Like Air (1953–1958)
A Celebration for George Sarton
Dialogue
The Furies
The Action of the Beautiful
On Being Given Time
The Metaphysical Garden
Where Dream Begins
Lament for Toby, a French Poodle
Green Song
These Were Her Nightly Journeys
The Olive Grove
Mediterranean
At Muzot
To the North
After Four Years
Somersault
The Frog, that Naked Creature
The Phoenix
In Time Like Air
Nativity
Annunciation
All Souls
Lifting Stone
Binding the Dragon
The Fall
The Other Place
Definition
Forethought
A Pair of Hands
My Father’s Death
The Light Years
Spring Day
By Moonlight
Reflections in a Double Mirror
Death and the Lovers
Cloud, Stone, Sun, Vine (1958–1961)
A Divorce of Lovers:
Now these two warring halves are to be parted
I shall not see the end of this unweaving
One death’s true death, and that is—not to care
Did you achieve this with a simple word
What price serenity these cruel days
Dear fellow-sufferer, dear cruelty
Your greatness withers when it shuts out grief
Now we have lost the heartways and the word
What if a homing pigeon lost its home
So drive back hating Love and loving Hate
It does not mean that we shall find the place
Others have cherished, perhaps loved me more
Wild seas, wild seas, and the gulls veering close
For all the loving words and difficult
As I look out on the long swell of fields
The cat sleeps on my desk in the pale sun
After a night of driving rain, the skies
These riches burst from every barren tree
Where do I go? Nowhere. And who am I
Now silence, silence, silence, and within it
Moving In
Reflections by a Fire
Mud Season
Spring Planting
A Flower-Arranging Summer
Hour of Proof
Der Abschied
A Private Mythology (1961–1966)
The Beautiful Pauses
A Child’s Japan
A Country House
Kyoko
Japanese Prints
Four Views of Fujiyama
On the Way to Lake Chuzen-ji
Lake Chuzen-ji
Enkaku-ji, Zen Monastery
Three Variations on a Theme
Seen from a Train
The Leopards at Nanzen-ji
At Katsura, Imperial Villa
The Inland Sea
Tourist
In a Bus
Carp Garden
A Nobleman’s House
Inn at Kyoto
An Exchange of Gifts
The Stone Garden
Wood, Paper, Stone
The Approach—Calcutta
Notes from India
1. At Bhubaneswar
2. At Kanarak
3. At Puri
4. At Fathpur Sikri
In Kashmir
The Sleeping God
Birthday on the Acropolis
Nostalgia for India
On Patmos
Another Island
At Lindos
At Delphi
Ballads of the Traveler
Lazarus
Heureux Qui, Comme Ulysse…
Of Havens
The House in Winter
Still Life in Snowstorm
A Fugue of Wings
An Observation
Learning about Water
An Artesian Well
A Late Mowing
A Country Incident
Second Thoughts on the Abstract Gardens of Japan
A Village Tale
The Horse-Pulling
Franz, a Goose
Lovers at the Zoo
Death and the Turtle
Elegy for Meta
Death of a Psychiatrist
Conversation in Black and White
The Walled Garden at Clondalkin
A Recognition
Joy in Provence
Baroque Image
As Does New Hampshire (1967)
Winter Night
March-Mad
Metamorphosis
Apple Tree in May
A Glass of Water
Stone Walls
A Guest
A Grain of Mustard Seed (1967–1971)
A Ballad of the Sixties
The Rock in the Snowball
The Invocation to Kali
The Kingdom of Kali
The Concentration Camps
The Time of Burning
After the Tiger
We’ll to the Woods No More, the Laurels Are Cut Down
Night Watch
Proteus
A Last Word
Girl with ’Cello
The Muse as Medusa
For Rosalind
The Great Transparencies
Friendship: The Storms
Evening Walk in France
Dutch Interior
A Vision of Holland
Bears and Waterfalls
A Parrot
Eine Kleine Snailmusik
The Fig
A Hard Death
The Silence
Annunciation
At Chartres
Once More at Chartres
Jonah
Easter Morning
The Godhead as Lynx
The Waves
Beyond the Question
Invocation
A Durable Fire (1969–1972)
Gestalt at Sixty
Myself to Me
Dear Solid Earth
The Return of Aphrodite
Inner Space
Things Seen
Mozart Again
The Tree Peony
A Chinese Landscape
Reeds and Water
The Snow Light
Warning
Surfers
All Day I Was with Trees
A Storm of Angels
The Angels and the Furies
After an Island
Fulfillment
The Autumn Sonnets:
Under the leaves an infant love lies dead
If I can let you go as trees let go
I wake to gentle mist over the meadow
I never thought that it could be, not once
After a night of rain the brilliant screen
As if the house were dying or already dead
Twice I have set my heart upon a sharing
I ponder it again and know for sure
This was our testing year after the first
We watched the waterfalls, rich and baroque
For steadfast flame wood must be seasoned
February Days
Note to a Photographer
March in New England
Composition
Burial
Of Grief
Prisoner at a Desk
Birthday Present
Elegy for Louise Bogan
Letters to a Psychiatrist:
Christmas Letter, 1970
The Fear of Angels
The Action of Therapy
I Speak of Change
Easter 1971
The Contemplation of Wisdom
A Biography of May Sarton
Publisher’s Note
Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.
But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page.
Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?
In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.
But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.
Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s Disclaimer
as it appears in two different type sizes.
Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of Disclaimer,
you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading Disclaimer
on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead
is a complete line, while the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn
is not.
Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.
Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.
Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to feel assured that the way the lines appear on the screen is an accurate embodiment of the way the author wants the lines to sound. Ever since poems began to be written down, the manner in which they ought to be written down has seemed equivocal; ambiguities have always resulted. By taking advantage of the technologies available in our time, our goal is to deliver the most satisfying reading experience possible.
Encounter in April
(1930–1937)
FIRST SNOW
This is the first soft snow
That tiptoes up to your door
As you sit by the fire and sew,
That sifts through a crack in the floor
And covers your hair with hoar.
This is the stiffening wound
Burning the heart of a deer
Chased by a moon-white hound,
This is the hunt and the queer
Sick beating of feet that fear.
This is the crisp despair
Lying close to the marrow,
Fallen out of the air
Like frost on the narrow
Bone of a shot sparrow.
This is the love that will seize
Savagely onto your mind
And do whatever he please,
This the despair, and a moon-blind
Hound you will never bind.
‘SHE SHALL BE CALLED WOMAN’
Genesis II, 23
1
She did not cry out
nor move.
She lay quite still
and leaned against the great curve
of the earth,
and her breast
was like a fruit
bursten of its own sweetness.
She did not move
nor cry out —
she only looked down
at the hand
against her breast.
She looked down
at the naked hand
and wept.
She could not yet endure
this delicate savage
to lie upon her.
She could not yet endure
the blood to beat so there.
She could not cope
with the first ache
of fullness.
She lay quite still
and looked down
at the hand
where blood was locked
and longed to loose the blood
and let it flow
over her breast
like rain.
She did not move
nor cry out.
She lay beneath the hand
conceiving of a flower,
a little white flower,
the flower of love —
she bore it like a child.
2
Not on the earth
but surely somewhere
between the elements
of air and sea
she lay that night,
no rim of bone to mark
where body clove to body
and no separate flesh,
strangely impenetrable —
O somewhere surely
did she come
to that clear turquoise place
where sky and water meet
and lay transparent there,
knowing the wave.
3
She bore the wound of desire
and it did not close,
though she had tried
to burn her hand
and turn one pain
into a simpler pain —
yet it did not close.
She had not known
how strong
the body’s will,
how intricate
the stirring of its litheness
that lay now
unstrung,
like a bow —
she saw herself
disrupted at the center
and torn.
And she went into the sea
because her core ached
and there was no healing.
4
Not in denial, her peace.
For there in the sea
where she had wished
to leave her body
like a little garment,
she saw now
that not by severing this
would finity be ended
and the atom die,
not so the pure abstract
exist alone.
From those vast places
she must come back
into her particle.
She must put on again
the little garment
of hunger.
Not in denial
her appeasement,
not yet.
5
For a long time
it would be pain
and weakness,
and she who worshiped
all straight things
and the narrow breast
would lie relaxed
like an animal asleep,
without strength.
For a long time
a consciousness possessed her
that felt into all grief
as if it were a wound
within herself —
a mouse with its tiny shriek
would leave her
drained and spent.
The unanswerable body
seemed
held in an icy pity
for all livingness —
that was itself initiate.
6
And then one day
all feeling
slipped out from her skin,
until no finger’s consciousness remained,
no pain —
and she all turned
to earth
like abstract gravity.
She did not know
how she had come
to close her separate lids
nor where she learned
the gesture of her sleeping,
yet something in her slept
most deeply,
and something in her
lay like stone
under a folded dress —
she could not tell how long.
7
Her body was a city
where the soul
had lain asleep,
and now she woke.
She was aware
down to extremity
of how herself was charged,
fibre electric,
a hand under her breast
could hear the dynamo.
A hand upon her wrist
could feel the pulse beat,
imminent.
She felt the atoms stir,
the myriad expand
and stir.
She looked at her hand —
the mesh
with its multitude of lines,
the exquisite small hairs,
the veins
finding their way
down to the nails,
the nails themselves
set in so firmly
with half-moons
at their base,
the fine-set bone,
knuckle and sinew,
and she examined
the mysterious legend
upon the palm —
this was her hand,
a present someone had given her.
And she looked at her breasts
that were firm and full,
standing straightly
out from her chest,
and were each a city
mysteriously part
of other cities.
The earth itself
was not more intricate,
more lovely
than these two
cupped in her hands,
heavy in her hands.
Nothing ever was
as wonderful as this.
8
She let her hands
go softly down her skin,
the curving rib,
soft belly
and slim thigh.
She let her hands
slip down
as if they held a shift
and she were trying it
for the first time,
a shining supple garment
she would not want to lose:
So did she clothe herself.
9
She would not ever be naked
again —
she would not know
that nakedness
that stretches to the brim
and finds no shelter
from the pure terrific
light of space.