Written in Santa Fe, New Mexico, May Sarton’s third collection of poems takes inspiration from the land, the light, and the palette of the American Southwest. With archaeological precision, Sarton uncovers American history and heredity. “Plain grandeur escapes definition,” begins one poem. But Sarton’s America is alive with history and is continually redefined by its own settings and mythology.
Written in Santa Fe, New Mexico, May Sarton’s third collection of poems takes inspiration from the land, the light, and the palette of the American Southwest. With archaeological precision, Sarton uncovers American history and heredity. “Plain grandeur escapes definition,” begins one poem. But Sarton’s America is alive with history and is continually redefined by its own settings and mythology.
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Overview
Written in Santa Fe, New Mexico, May Sarton’s third collection of poems takes inspiration from the land, the light, and the palette of the American Southwest. With archaeological precision, Sarton uncovers American history and heredity. “Plain grandeur escapes definition,” begins one poem. But Sarton’s America is alive with history and is continually redefined by its own settings and mythology.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480474345 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 03/25/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 104 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
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 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.
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.
Read an Excerpt
The Lion and the Rose
Poems
By May Sarton
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1948 May SartonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-7434-5
CHAPTER 1
MEDITATION IN SUNLIGHT
In space in time I sit
Thousands of feet above
The sea and meditate
On solitude on love
Near all is brown and poor
Houses are made of earth
Sun opens every door
The city is a hearth
Far all is blue and strange
The sky looks down on snow
And meets the mountain range
Where time is light not shadow
Time in the heart held still
Space as the household god
And joy instead of will
Knows love as solitude
Knows solitude as love
Knows time as light not shadow
Thousands of feet above
The sea where I am now
Who wear an envelope
Of crystal air and learn
That space is also hope
Where sky and snow both burn
Where spring is love not weather
And I happy alone
The place the time together
The sun upon the stone.
DIFFICULT SCENE
This landscape does not speak,
Exists, is simply there.
Take it or leave it; the weak
Suffer from fierce air.
For these high desolate
Lands where earth is skeleton
Make no demands; they state.
Who can resist the stone?
Implacable tranquility
That searches out the naked heart,
Touches the quick of anxiety
And breaks the world apart.
The angel in the flaming air
Is everywhere and no escape,
Asking of life that it be pure
And given as the austere landscape.
And most accompanied when alone;
Most sensitive when mastered sense;
Alive most when the will is gone,
Absence become the greatest Presence.
The golden landscape cannot save,
It only asks your right to be here.
Live, if you do not break the wave
Of time mounting the holy air.
The flaming angel does not show
The path to any near salvation.
Live, if the sun burning the snow
Suggests that passion is compassion.
THE WINDOW
Finite, exact, the square
Frames the long curve
Of hills and perpendicular
Spray of the delicate tree.
Wires, slanting, swerve
Off the flat scene;
And shining through
The mathematical window
The burning sky and the blue sun
Create a flowing fourth dimension:
The square explodes in space.
Then through the abstract window
Darkness comes down so deep
The exact mountains show
Sleep in a flowing line,
Earth in a flowing sleep.
But suddenly alive
The rivers of the air
Invade the static square;
As the stars only move
Obedient to Love,
Heart opens into time.
The square explodes in space,
The window opens into time—
As poems breathe within their strict design,
As holiness may look out from a face.
THE LION AND THE ROSE
Vision is locked in stone.
The lion in the air is gone
With the great lion of the sun.
The sky is wild and cold.
The tawny fire is gone.
The hill where love did open like a rose
Is black. It snows.
Emptiness flows.
The flowers in the heart all close
Drowned in a heavy white. Love knows
That poverty untold,
The cave where nothing grows.
The flaming lions of the flesh are gone,
Their power withdrawn.
God of the empty room,
Thy will be done. Thy will be done.
Now shine the inward sun,
The beating heart that glows
Within the skeleton,
The magic rose, the purer living gold,
Shine now, grown old.
All that is young and bold,
The lion's roar, the flaming skin and wild,
Unearthly peace now cherish and enfold
And fresh sleep overcome,
That in this death-in-life, delicate, cold,
The spiritual rose
Flower among the snows—
The love surpassing love.
WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA
All day I had seen a nearer dot on the map, this town,
A night's sleep and the end of speeding and climbing
The steep magnificent hills, a way of coming home.
It is a still town where the past lies dreaming.
Drenched in the old sun, washed in the gold light,
Orderly and gay with white sills gleaming
And brick that glows by day and frames the night.
It is a warm town where the past is living.
The ancient walls draw comfort from the ancient trees.
Their roots are bound together in the earth and breathing.
They wear their double beauty with a marvelous ease.
It is a deep town where the past is sleeping,
And in the silence on the sills the soldiers' spurs
Are stilled and all the shouting and the women weeping
As the town is taken and lost in those unburied wars.
It is a strange town where the past is breathing.
For nothing is lost that has happened, nothing is over.
The traveller walking dark streets is silently leaving
His step beside Stonewall Jackson's like a lover—
For all foresees him here and he remembers all and knows
That from this past the future rises streaming,
And from this town relationship is born and flows.
It is a good town where the past is growing
Into the whole stretch of the land and touches all
With warmth about the heart and gives a form to living,
A still town where the stranger listens to his footsteps fall.
MONTICELLO
This legendary house, this dear enchanted tomb,
Once so supremely lived in and for life designed,
Will none of mouldy death nor give it room,
Charged with the presence of a living mind.
Enter and touch the temper of a lively man.
See, it is spacious, intimate and full of light.
The eye, pleased by detail, is nourished by the plan;
Nothing is here for show, much for delight.
All the joy of invention and of craft and wit
Are freely granted here, all given rein,
But taut within the classic form and ruled by it,
Elegant, various, magnificent—and plain,
Europe become implacably American!
But Mozart still could have been happy here,
And Monroe riding from his farm again,
As well as any silversmith or carpenter—
As well as we, for whom this elegance,
This freedom in a form, this peaceful grace
Is not our heritage, although it happened once:
We read the future, not the past, upon his face.
The time must come when, from the people's heart,
Government grows to meet the stature of a man,
And freedom finds its form, that great unruly art,
And the state is a house designed by Jefferson.
IN DEEP CONCERN
Guilford College, North Carolina
Quakers define the hour when thoughts begin to burn,
And faith leaps from the heart into the hands,
That great turbulence of spirit, "a concern",
The hour when contemplation breaks its bonds.
Poems are written, colleges are built, states live
When people go out from their thinking to the street
With a faith in their hands so deep and positive
It makes the vision truth. Here thought and action meet.
So the idea of a college, a hundred years ago,
Was born from Quakers' deep concern, and with their hands
They dug and baked clay into bricks that warmly glow
Still with the heat of faith. That college stands.
But still we, later, are not sure. We are bound fast.
We do not know for certain. We have not got it clear:
Paul Revere rode, and Franklin went to France, John Brown
Was hanged because thought burned to action in the past,
Because thought grew so deep and hot it cast out fear.
And it is matter for concern whether we shall go down,
Or from the deeps of thought and prayer take up our stand
Where faith moves from the mind into the working hand.
CHARLESTON PLANTATIONS
You cannot see them from the road: go far and deep,
Down the long avenues where mosses cover up the leaves,
Across the empty terraced lawns neglected and asleep,
To the still place where no dog barks and no dove grieves,
And a black mirror gives you back your face too white
In pools dyed jet by cypress roots: go deep and far,
Deep into time, far into crumbling spaces and half-light
To where they stand, our Egypt and our Nineveh.
Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters' houses.
The garlands and the little foxes' faces carved
Upon the mantels look on empty walls and water-stains
And the stairs tremble though so elegantly curved,
(Outside are waiting the bright creeping vines)
And as your foot falls in the silences, you guess
Decay has been arrested for a moment in the wall
But the grey plumes upon the trees in deathly loveliness
Will stir when you have passed, and somewhere a stone fall.
Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters' houses.
There is no rice now and the world that sprang from it
Like an azalea, brilliant from the swamps, has crumbled.
A single century, it is embalmed as Egypt,
A single century, and all that elegance was humbled—
While we who fired that world and watched it burn
Come every spring to whisper near the tomb,
To stare, a little shaken, where the mosses mourn
And the azaleas and magnolias have not ceased to bloom.
Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters' houses.
WHERE THE PEACOCK CRIED
Natchez, Mississippi
The Cotton Kings
Nothing could match the era's dazzling façade,
The white grace of the pillars in a gloom of trees;
No sword has scarred, no vulgar hand has overlaid
The pure triumphant form of this American Acropolis:
Nothing could match the era's marvelous shell.
But push the heavy door and enter the dark chill
Of empty halls. Listen while you are told,
"The locks are solid silver, floors the old cypress still,
Mantels Italian marble and twenty-carat gold
Gilds the great mirrors"—that reflect the shabby places
In the imported carpet and the tourists' vacant faces.
This was a beauty bought intact, mourning no dream,
Paid for in cash, perhaps, but with no human breath.
It is as brutal, savage as a peacock's scream,
Emblem of luxury and emptiness and death—
Look for the heart within the house, the center of the cult,
Look for the hearth, the household god, the mystery;
You will not find it where all is perfect to a fault,
Buried and cold under the weight of history,
Gone with the swans that swam the artificial lakes.
Did they with violent beating of white wings
Vanish—for all wild beauty death forsakes—
To leave the house to die among its things?
Nothing could match the era's dazzling façade,
Nothing more lovely than the white Grecian portico,
Where, if there was a dream, did the dream go?
Where is the life lived here and what it made?
That when you ask, the smug descendants say,
"We lit a thousand candles here for Henry Clay."
The answer is not war that always has intensified
A living dream.
But here the peacock cried.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Lion and the Rose by May Sarton. Copyright © 1948 May Sarton. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Publisher's Note,I THEME AND VARIATIONS,
Meditation in Sunlight,
Difficult Scene,
The Window,
The Lion and The Rose,
II AMERICAN LANDSCAPES,
Winchester, Virginia,
Monticello,
In Deep Concern,
Charleston Plantations,
Where The Peacock Cried,
In Texas,
Boulder Dam,
Colorado Mountains,
Of The Seasons,
Indian Dances,
Santos: New Mexico,
Poet in Residence (1-5),
III THE WORK OF HAPPINESS,
New Year Wishes,
Definition,
Song: No, I will never forget you,
The Work of Happiness,
After a Train Journey,
Night Storm,
O Who Can Tell?,
The Clavichord,
Song: Now let us honor,
The White-Haired Man,
In That Deep Wood,
In Memoriam (1-3),
Poem in Autumn,
Now Voyager,
My Sisters, O My Sisters (1-4),
IV LOVE POEMS,
The Lady and The Unicorn,
Spring Song,
The Harvest,
Definition of Love,
Song: When I imagine what to give you,
Magnet,
Question,
Three Sonnets,
Perspective,
Return,
"O Saisons! O Chateaux!",
V TO THE LIVING,
These Pure Arches,
We Have Seen The Wind,
Homage to Flanders,
The Sacred Order,
What The Old Man Said,
Not Always The Quiet Word,
Roman Head,
Navigator,
Unlucky Soldier,
Who Wakes,
Return to Chartres,
To The Living (1-4),
The Tortured,
The Birthday,
VI CELEBRATIONS,
About the Author,