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“I loved them (the muses) in the way that one loves at any age, if it’s real at all. Obsessively, painfully, with wild exaltation, with guilt, with conflict. I wrote poems to and about them. I put them into novels, disguised, of course. I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often  maddening. I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world and, in a way, I suppose they were. Love opens the doors into everything as far as I can see, including, and perhaps, most of all, the door into one’s own, secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.”
 - May Sarton,  from MRS. STEVENS HEARS THE MERMAIDS SINGING.

Essayist, novelist, journal writer, feminist, lesbian, and poet, May Sarton, was born in Wondelgem, Belgium, on May 3, 1912. She was the only child of George and Mabel Sarton. In 1916, as the German war machine approached Belgium, the Sartons immigrated to the United States, settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, Sarton’s father, an esteemed historian of science, joined the faculty of Harvard University.

With the assistance of several grants from the Carnegie Institute, George Sarton devoted most of his free time to his scholarship. Likewise, Sarton’s mother, an artist and designer, was perpetually  immersed in her work. Looking back on her childhood, Sarton often said she felt neglected as a child.

May Sarton was the product of two distinct cultures: Belgium and her adopted country, the United States. When she was 12, Sarton spent a year at the Institut Belge de Culture Française. There, she met her first muse: Marie Closset, who published poetry under the pseudonym, Jean Dominique. It was Closset, Sarton said, who first sparked her passion for creating poetry. 

Upon graduating from Cambridge’s High and Latin School, in 1929, Sarton was offered a full scholarship to Vassar College. She declined the offer, much to her father’s dismay. Instead, she moved to New York City, where she pursued a career as an actress. She became an apprentice in Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre and, eventually, appeared in several of the company’s productions.

But Sarton never stopped writing poetry. After the Great Depression claimed Le Gallienne’s theatre company, Sarton founded her own Associated Actors Theatre Company. When that, too, failed, Sarton had reached a crossroads in her young life; she decided to forsake acting and resolved to dedicate herself to her writing.

Supported by her father throughout her young adulthood, Sarton rarely held a job. She frequently returned to Europe where she fell into the company of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Julian and Juliette Huxley, Luge Poe, Basil de Selincourt, Hilda Dolittle, Stephan Spender, W.H. Auden, Dame Edith Sitwell and SS Kotelinsky.

In 1937, her first collection of poetry, ENCOUNTERS IN APRIL, was published. A year later, her first novel, THE SINGLE HOUND, appeared on bookstore shelves. Though she had very few (if any) credentials, Sarton, in the 1940s, began lecturing (and, eventually, teaching) on the art of poetry at colleges and universities throughout the United States.

Other works by Sarton soon followed, including her second volume of poetry, INNER LANDSCAPE, in 1939, her novel, THE BRIDGE OF YEARS, in 1946, the novels SHADOW OF A MAN, in 1950, and SHOWER OF SUMMER DAYS, in 1952. The following year, Sarton’s third collection of poetry, THE LAND OF SILENCE, won the Reynolds Lyric Award. In 1954, Sarton wrote her first memoir, I KNEW A PHOENIX. In 1958, her volume of poetry, IN TIME LIKE AIR, which many critics believe to be one her best works in the genre, was nominated for a National Book Award.

Sarton did not achieve any measure of financial independence until after her parents had died. In 1958, she sold her childhood home in Cambridge, where she had lived, off and on, until she was well into her forties. Dismayed by what she believed to be her lack of serious critical attention as a poet and writer, Sarton decided to withdraw from the world, at least to a degree. She bought an old house in the remote hamlet of Nelson, New Hampshire. It was there where she created many of her most distinguished and popular works.

In 1961, she wrote the novel, THE SMALL ROOM, followed, in 1965, by the autobiographical novel, MRS. STEVENS HEARS THE MERMAIDS SINGING. It was in MRS. STEVENS that Sarton “came out” as a lesbian. In 1968, she published her second memoir, PLANT DREAMING DEEP. In 1969, she published the novella, THE POET AND THE DONKEY, followed, in 1970, by the popular novel, KINDS OF LOVE.

In 1973, Sarton published what is arguably the most distinguished work in her canon, JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE. Praised by critics and feminists alike, JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE depicted the writer as a strong independent artist who was at the peak of her form. JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE continues to be required reading in many women’s studies courses at colleges and universities throughout the country. The book’s enduring popularity also significantly expanded Sarton’s reading audience.

Commenting on Sarton’s work in her book, HAMLET’S MOTHER AND OTHER WOMEN, Carolyn Heilbrun writes, “I would name 1972 as the turning point for modern women’s autobiography…the publication of JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE in 1973 may be acknowledged as the watershed in women’s autobiography.”

Throughout this period, Sarton also published several volumes of poetry, including, CLOUD, STONE, SUN, VINE, in 1961, A PRIVATE MYTHOLOGY, in 1966, AS DOES NEW HAMPSHIRE, in 1967, A GRAIN OF MUSTARD SEED, in 1970, and A DURABLE FIRE, in 1972.

Shortly after JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE was published, Sarton sold her house in New Hampshire and moved to a rented house by the ocean, in York, Maine. There, she continued to produce works, including a series of journals, THE HOUSE BY THE SEA in 1977, AT SEVENTY in 1982, ENDGAME in 1992, ENCORE, in 1993, and AT EIGHTY-TWO, in 1995, and novels, such as ANGER, in 1982, THE MAGNIFICENT SPINSTER, in 1985, and THE EDUCATION OF HARRIET HATFIELD, in 1989. She also continued to publish volumes of poetry, such as HALFWAY TO SILENCE, in 1980, LETTERS FROM MAINE, in 1984, and THE SILENCE NOW, in 1988.

In WORLD OF LIGHT, a 1979 documentary on Sarton,  produced by Martha Wheelock and Marita Simpson for Ishtar Films, Sarton, speaking on the art of writing poetry and her own creative process says,  “...I don’t write poems very often and when I do, they come in batches and they always seem to be connected to a woman, in my case, a muse who focuses the world for me and sometimes it’s  a love affair and sometimes it’s not. This is why I write poems; to find out what I’m really feeling. I can never write in form unless I’m inspired." 

"And when I write in form it’s anything but something intellectually worked-for. The lines run through my head and I can’t stop them. I wrote the whole sequence  - the DIVORCE OF LOVERS sequence - on a lecture trip when I had a high fever and I was terribly exhausted, and the poems would just push me. I’d have to get up in the middle of the night and write them all down. They just flowed through me, and this is a good example of real inspiration; it was out of a lot of pain and suddenly the whole thing just came through in the poem."

"...It isn’t easy to be a woman poet. Partly, because it has always seemed - and this may be true of the woman writer, the woman artist, in general - that one is a little outside the mainstream; not at the center of life.  We now can begin to hope that we, as women writers, can be whole human beings who no longer have to be recluses, like Emily Dickinson, or women with forty lovers, like George Sands."

"We have to make myths out of our lives in order to sustain them and I think this is partly how one handles the monster, really...Life must flow through you at every moment and through every day. You’re really a receptacle, an instrument for life to flow through and if you keep stomping it with over-control, it’s not good, whether you’re a creator, or not. So, there, too, I think I’ve taken a stand on letting one’s feelings out; on honoring one’s feelings, even when they may seem negative. If you examine anger, it has a great deal to teach you and it has growth in it - the possibility of growth -, if you can face it."

"I think the deeper you go into the personal, the more universal you are. I mean, if you can go deep enough and if it’s no longer a sort of ‘look at me, I’m in pain’ poem. And, of course, the image is what does it; the image is key. When you’ve got the metaphor, you’ve got it...I also think that you choose to be a novelist but you’re chosen to be a poet. This is a gift and it’s a tremendous responsibility. You have to be willing to give something terribly intimate and secret of yourself to the world and not care, because you have to believe that what you have to say is important enough...I would like all my work, in the end, to be transparent. Something that’s transparent can be very deep, like a well.”

In 1993, Poetry Magazine awarded Sarton its distinguished Levinson Award for her last poetry collection, COMING INTO EIGHTY. By the time of her death in 1995, Sarton had, at the age of 83, left the world a legacy of 53 books, including 19 novels, 17 poetry collections, 15 non-fiction works, and 2 children’s books.  Although she has always been best known for her novels and journals, Sarton often lamented that she was overlooked, by critics, as a gifted, intelligent, and sensitive poet.

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 never bind.

(originally published in ENCOUNTERS IN APRIL, 1937)

WHO WAKES

Who wakes now who lay blind with sleep?
Who starts bright-eyed with anger from his bed?
I do. I, the plain citizen. I cannot sleep.
I hold the torturing fire in my head.
I, an American, call the dead Negro’s name,
And in the hot dark of the city night
I walk the streets alone and sweat with shame.
Too late to rise, to raise the dead too late.
This is the harvest. The seeds sown long ago -
The careless word, sly thought, excusing glance.
I reap now everything I let pass, let go.
This is the harvest of my own indifference.
I, the plain citizen, have grown disorder
In my own world. It is not what I meant.
But dreams and images are potent and can murder.
I stand accused of them. I am not innocent.
Can I now plant imagination, honesty,
And love, where violence and terror were unbound -
The images of hope, the dream’s responsibility?
Those who died here were murdered in my mind.

(originally published in INNER LANDSCAPE, 1938)

IN TIME LIKE AIR

Consider the mysterious salt:
In water it must disappear.
It has no self. It knows no fault.
Not even sight may apprehend it.
No one may gather it or spend it.
It is dissolved and everywhere.

But, out of water into air,
It must resolve into a presence,
Precise and tangible and here.
Faultlessly pure, faultlessly white,
It crystallizes in our sight
And has defined itself to essence.

What element dissolves the soul
So it may be both found and lost,
In what suspended as a whole?
What is the element so blest
That there identity can rest
As salt in the clear water cast?

Love, in its early transformation,
And only love, may so design it
That the self flows in pure sensation,
Is all dissolved, and found at last
Without a future or a past,
And a whole life suspended in it.

The faultless crystal of detachment
Comes after, cannot be created
Without the first intense attachment.
Even the saints achieve this slowly;
For us, more human, less holy,
In time like air is essence stated.

(originally published in IN TIME LIKE AIR, 1958)

SOMERSAULT

Not to rebel against  what pulls us down,
The private burden each of us could name
That weigh heavily in the blood and bone
So that we stumble, clumsy half the time
Unable to love well or love at all!
Who knows the full weight that another bears,
What obscure densities sustains alone,
To burst fearfully through what self-locked doors?
So heavy is our walk with what we feel,
And cannot tell, and cannot ever tell.
Oh, to have the lightness, the savoir faire
Of a tightrope walker, his quicksilver tread
As he runs softly over the taut steel thread;
Sharp as a knife blade cutting walls of air,
He’s pitted against weights we cannot see,
All tension balanced, though we see him only
A rapture of grace and skill, focused and lonely.
Is it a question of discipline or grace?
The steel trap of the will or some slight shift
Within an opened consciousness?
The tightrope walker juggles weights, to lift
Himself up on the stress, and, airy master
Of his own loss, he springs from heaviness.
But we, stumbling our way, how learn such poise,
The perfect balance of all griefs and joys?
Burdened by love, how learn the light release
That, out of stress, can somersault to peace?

(originally published in IN TIME LIKE AIR, 1958)

(FROM) DIVORCE OF LOVERS

                          5
What price serenity these cruel days?
Your silence and ungiving, my small cries,
Followed by hours when I can lift some praise
And make the wound sing as in Paradise.
What price the poise you ask for, the unharried?
Four rooted years torn up without a qualm,
A past not dead perhaps, but quickly buried:
On one side anguish, on the other calm,
Both terrible because deprived of hope
Like living eyes still open in a grave.
And we shall lunch, you say, that is our scope.
Between what we have lost and still might save
Lies, very quiet, what was once too human,
And lovely, and beloved, a living woman.

                         10
So drive back hating Love and loving Hate
To where, until we met, they had been thrown
Since infancy: forever lock that gate
And let them lacerate themselves alone,
Wild animals we never learned to tame,
But faced in growing anguish through the mist,
Elusive beasts we did not dare to name,
And whom we could not dominate or trust.
Now we bury childish hunger, childish greed
In play-pen, zoo-pen, whatever pen will hold
The wild frustration and the starving need:
This is your method, so I have been told.
And mine? Stand fast, and face the animal
With the full force and pardon of the soul.

                         16
The cat sleeps on my desk in the pale sun;
Long bands of light lie warm across the floor.
I have come back into my world of no one,
This house where the long silences restore
The essence and to time its real dimension;
All I have lost or squandered I examine
Free of the wars and long searing tension;
And I am nourished here after the famine.
Though this was time that we had planned to spend
Together, circled on the calendars,
To walk my woods for one weekend,
Last night I looked alone at the bright stars.
Nor time, nor absence breaks this world in two.
You hold me in your heart, as I hold you.

                         20
Now silence, silence, silence, and within it
The leap of spirit upward and beyond;
We take the heart’s world in our hands and spin it
Out to the distant stars above this ground,
And let it go at last, and let it go
With those illusions that we held too long;
Against our will now we are forced to grow
And push out from all safety into song.
This is one half of it, the saving grace;
The other, the dark struggle, as, like worms,
We riddle darkness, tunnel some small space
Where we can lie with patience through the storms.
And of these two, who knows where wisdom lies,
Deep in the earth, or wondering the skies?

(originally published in CLOUD, STONE, SUN, VINE (1961)

AN OBSERVATION

True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother’s hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world.

(originally published in A PRIVATE MYTHOLOGY, 1966)

THE WAVES

Even in the middle of the silent firs,
The secret world of mushroom and of moss,
Where all is delicate and nothing stirs,
We get the rumor of those distant wars
And the harsh sound of loss.

This is an island open to the churning,
The boom, the constant cannonade,
The turning back of tides and their returning,
And ocean broken like some restless mourning
That cannot find a bed.

Oh love, let us be true then to this will-
Not to each other, human and defeated,
But to great power, our Heaven and our Hell,
That thunders out its triumph unabated,
And is never still.

For we are married to this rocky coast,
To the charge of huge waves upon it,
The ceaseless war, the tide gained and then lost,
And ledges worn down smooth but not downcast-
Wild rose and granite.

Here in the darkness of the stillest wood,
Absence, the ocean, tires us with its roar;
We bear love’s thundering rumor in the blood
Beyond our understanding, ill or good-
Listen, once more!

(originally published in A GRAIN OF MUSTARD SEED, 1971)

OF MOLLUSKS

As the tide rises, the closed mollusk
Opens a fraction to the ocean’s food,
Bathed in its riches. Do not ask
What force would do, or if force could.
A knife is of no use against a fortress.
You might break it to pieces as gulls do.
No, only the rising tide and its slow progress
Opens the shell. Lovers, I tell you true.
You who have held yourselves closed hard
Against warm sun and wind, shelled up in fears
And hostile to a touch or tender word -
The ocean rises, salt as unshed tears.
Now you are floated on this gentle flood
That cannot force or be forced, welcome food
Salt as your tears, the rich ocean’s blood,
Eat, rest, be nourished on the tide of love.

(originally published in HALFWAY  TO SILENCE, 1980)

WILDERNESS LOST
(for Bramble, my cat)

                    I
She was the wilderness in me
The secret solitary place
Where grow the healing herbs.
We had recognized each other
Years ago; the bond was deep.
Now since her death
Two seasons ago
The landscape is ghostly.
No small black and gold panther
Steals through the long grasses
And pounces on a mouse.
No one curls up on the terrace wall
Gathering the day together.
No round shadow sits on my sill
Late at night, waiting to be let in,
And then in one jump comes to lie beside me,
A long pillow of purrs along my back.
                    II
Distant, passionate one,
I miss you in my bones.
I miss you in my heartbeat.
I have mourned you for nine months.
What does not leave me
Is your great luminous eye
Open to its golden rim,
The darkness so dark, the deepness so deep there
I wanted to go with you to death
But in a few seconds
The needle did its good work.
You had gone-
And in a new time
I grow old without you.

It is all very still now,
The grief washed out.

(originally published in THE SILENCE NOW, 1988)

THE PHOENIX AGAIN

On the ashes of this nest
Love wove with deathly fire
The phoenix takes its rest
Forgetting all desire.

After the flame, a pause,
After the pain, rebirth.
Obeying nature’s laws
The phoenix goes to earth.

You cannot call it old
You cannot call it young.
No phoenix can be told,
This is the end of the song.

It struggles now alone
Against death and self-doubt,
But underneath the bone
The wings are pushing out.

And one cold starry night
Whatever your belief
The phoenix will take flight
Over the seas of grief

To sing her thrilling song
To stars and waves and sky
For neither old nor young
The phoenix does not die.

(originally published in THE SILENCE NOW, 1988)

©Copyright, May Sarton.