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Collected Poems, 1930–1973
Collected Poems, 1930–1973
Collected Poems, 1930–1973
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Collected Poems, 1930–1973

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A splendidly edited anthology of the greatest poems of one of America’s finest writers

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.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 23, 2014
ISBN9781497689510
Collected Poems, 1930–1973
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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    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.

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