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    A Private Mythology: Poems
    A Private Mythology: Poems
    A Private Mythology: Poems
    Ebook140 pages1 hour

    A Private Mythology: Poems

    By May Sarton

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    About this ebook

    Stunning reflections chronicling a journey both spiritual and physical by May Sarton, one of America’s most beloved poets
    In celebration of her fiftieth birthday, May Sarton embarked on a pilgrimage around the world. Traveling through Japan, India, and Greece, she captured her spiritual discoveries in this vivid collection of poetry. Arresting images and meditations on the differences between East and West are rendered with the exceptional clarity of an accomplished artist.
    Winner of the Emily Clark Balch Prize.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMar 25, 2014
    ISBN9781480474321
    A Private Mythology: Poems
    Author

    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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      Book preview

      A Private Mythology - May Sarton

      A Private Mythology

      Poems

      May Sarton

      TO

      my students at Wellesley College

      1960—1964

      Contents

      Publisher’s Note

      The Beautiful Pauses

      A Private Mythology—I

      A Child’s Japan

      A Country House

      Kyoko

      Japanese Prints

      Shugaku-in, Imperial Villa

      A Nobleman’s House

      Inn at Kyoto

      An Exchange of Gifts

      The Stone Garden

      Wood, Paper, Stone

      The Approach—Calcutta

      Notes from India

      The Great Plain of India Seen from the Air

      In Kashmir

      The Sleeping God

      Birthday on the Acropolis

      Nostalgia for India

      A Greek Meal

      On Patmos

      Another Island

      At Lindos

      At Delphi

      Pastoral

      Ballads of the Traveler

      Lazarus

      A Private Mythology—II

      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

      The Animal World

      A Village Tale

      The Horse-Pulling

      Franz, a Goose

      Lovers at the Zoo

      The Great Cats and the Bears

      Turtle

      Death and the Turtle

      Elegies and Celebrations

      Elegy

      Death of a Psychiatrist

      Conversation in Black and White

      The Walled Garden at Clondalkin

      A Recognition

      Joy in Provence

      Baroque Image

      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.

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