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    The Poetry of May Sarton Volume One: Letters from Maine, Inner Landscape, and Halfway to Silence
    The Poetry of May Sarton Volume One: Letters from Maine, Inner Landscape, and Halfway to Silence
    The Poetry of May Sarton Volume One: Letters from Maine, Inner Landscape, and Halfway to Silence
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    The Poetry of May Sarton Volume One: Letters from Maine, Inner Landscape, and Halfway to Silence

    By May Sarton

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    Three celebrated volumes of verse from a feminist icon, poet, and author of the groundbreaking novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing.
     
    Letters from Maine: A rugged coastline provides a stark background for Sarton’s images of a tragically brief love. With vulnerability and emotional depth, she explores the willingness to devote everything to a new love, as well as the despair at the memory of what is left over when it fades.
     
    Inner Landscape: This collection of May Sarton’s poems displays her inimitable mix of stately verse and depth of feeling that lurks beneath every line, creating a tantalizing, magnetically charged distance between reader and poet.
     
    Halfway to Silence: After decades of writing flowing lyric verse, May Sarton’s style turned to short, vibrant bursts of poetry. These condensed poems are rife with exuberant impressions of nature and of love, including two of her most acclaimed works, “Old Lovers at the Ballet” and “Of the Muse.”
     
    Recognized as a true pioneer in lesbian literature, “Sarton’s poems enter and illuminate every natural corner of our lives. . . . So strong in their faith and in their positive response to the human condition that they will outlast much of the fashionable, cynical poetry of our ear” (James Martin).
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateNov 20, 2018
    ISBN9781504057103
    The Poetry of May Sarton Volume One: Letters from Maine, Inner Landscape, and Halfway to Silence
    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

      The Poetry of May Sarton Volume One - May Sarton

      The Poetry of May Sarton Volume One

      Letters from Maine, Inner Landscape, and Halfway to Silence

      May Sarton

      CONTENTS

      Publisher’s Note

      LETTERS FROM MAINE

      Part I Letters from Maine

      A Farewell

      Letters from Maine:

      Yes, I am home again, and alone.

      November opens the sky. I look out

      No letter from the muse. Time out.

      There was your voice, astonishment

      From a distance the ocean looks calm

      When a woman feels alone, when the room

      Who has spoken of the unicorn in old age?

      When I heard you say in a brisk voice

      The muse of course airs out the inner world

      The muse is here, she who dazzled the air

      Part II A Winter Garland

      Twelve Below

      Dead Center

      Shell

      Correspondence

      Snow Fall

      For Monet

      The Cold Night

      Seascape

      After a Winter’s Silence

      Moose in the Morning

      The Wood Pigeons

      Elegy: The Rose-Breasted Grosbeak

      April in Maine

      Part III Letters to Myself

      For Laurie

      Mourning to Do

      Survivors

      Who Knows Where the Joy Goes

      Ut Unium Sint

      An Elegy for Scrabble

      Cold Spring

      Intimation

      Letters to Myself

      The Seed

      The Consummation

      The Image is a Garden

      INNER LANDSCAPE

      I. From this Nettle

      Prayer Before Work

      Invocation

      Architectural Image

      Landscape

      Record

      Lament

      Understatement

      Granted This World

      II. Sonnets

      Summary

      Summary

      Conversation on the Telephone

      Address to the Heart

      Transition

      Translation

      The Vanquished

      Memory of Swans

      After Silence

      Canticles

      Winter Landscape

      From Men Who Died Deluded

      Afternoon on Washington Street

      The Puritan

      From a Train Window

      Static Landscape

      Considerations

      Winter Evening

      Map for Despair

      You Who Ask Peace

      The Pride of Trees

      Greeting

      A Letter to James Stephens

      HALFWAY TO SILENCE

      I

      After All These Years

      Two Songs

      The Oriole

      Old Trees

      A Voice

      The Balcony

      The Myths Return

      Time for Rich Silence

      Three Things

      The Lady of the Lake

      First Autumn

      Mal du Départ

      II

      Jealousy

      Control

      Along a Brook

      Beggar, Queen, and Ghost

      The Country of Pain

      Out of Touch

      At The Black Rock

      III

      The Turning of the Wind

      After the Storm

      Love

      Of Molluscs

      June Wind

      The Summer Tree

      Late Autumn

      The Geese

      Autumn Sonnets

      Pruning the Orchard

      Old Lovers at the Ballet

      IV

      On Sark

      In Suffolk

      A Winter Notebook

      Of the Muse

      Index

      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

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