by May Sarton
O terrible, life-giving marvelous shock,
The source that jets up from the rigid rock,
You, Praise, break from our hearts and change all grief
Into the living rivers of belief!
POEM IN AUTUMN
Now over everything the autumn light is thrown
And every line is sharp, and every leaf is clear.
Now without density or weight the airy sun
Sits in the flaming boughs, an innocent fire,
That shines but does not burn nor wither.
The leaves, light-penetrated, change their essence,
Take on the gold transparence of the weather,
Are touched by death, then by light’s holy presence.
So we, first touched by death, were changed in essence,
As if grief grew transparent and turned to airy gold,
And we were given days of special radiance,
Light-brimmed, light-shaken and with love so filled
It seemed the heart-beat of the world was in our blood;
And when we stood together, love was everywhere,
And no exchange was needed if exchange we could
The blessedness of sunlight poised on air.
NOW VOYAGER
Now voyager, lay here your dazzled head.
Come back to earth from air, be nourishèd,
Not with that light on light, but with this bread.
Here close to earth be cherished, mortal heart,
Hold your way deep as roots push rocks apart
To bring the spurt of green up from the dark.
Where music thundered let the mind be still,
Where the will triumphed let there be no will,
What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.
Here close to earth the deeper pulse is stirred,
Here where no wings rush and no sudden bird,
But only heart-beat upon beat is heard.
Here let the fiery burden be all spilled,
The passionate voice at last be calmed and stilled
And the long yearning of the blood fulfilled.
Now voyager, come home, come home to rest,
Here on the long-lost country of earth’s breast
Lay down the fiery vision and be blest, be blest.
MY SISTERS, O MY SISTERS
I
“Nous qui voulions poser, image ineffaceable
Comme un delta divin notre main sur le sable”
ANNA DE NOAILLES
Dorothy Wordsworth, dying, did not want to read,
“I am too busy with my own feelings,” she said.
And all women who have wanted to break out
Of the prison of consciousness to sing or shout
Are strange monsters who renounce the treasure
Of their silence for a curious devouring pleasure.
Dickinson, Rossetti, Sappho—they all know it,
Something is lost, strained, unforgiven in the poet.
She abdicates from life or like George Sand
Suffers from the mortality in an immortal hand,
Loves too much, spends a whole life to discover
She was born a good grandmother, not a good lover.
Too powerful for men: Madame de Stael. Too sensitive:
Madame de Sévigné, who burdened where she meant to give.
Delicate as that burden was and so supremely lovely,
It was too heavy for her daughter, much too heavy.
Only when she built inward in a fearful isolation
Did any one succeed or learn to fuse emotion
With thought. Only when she renounced did Emily
Begin in the fierce lonely light to learn to be.
Only in the extremity of spirit and the flesh
And in renouncing passion did Sappho come to bless.
Only in the farewells or in old age does sanity
Shine through the crimson stains of their mortality.
And now we who are writing women and strange monsters
Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers,
Still hope that we may learn to lay our hands
More gently and more subtly on the burning sands.
To be through what we make more simply human,
To come to the deep place where poet becomes woman,
Where nothing has to be renounced or given over
In the pure light that shines out from the lover,
In the warm light that brings forth fruit and flower
And that great sanity, that sun, the feminine power.
II
Let us rejoice in
The full curve of breast,
The supple thigh
And all riches in
A woman’s keeping
For man’s comfort and rest
(Crimson and ivory)
For children’s nourishment
(Magic fruits and flowers).
But when they are sleeping,
The children, the men,
Fed by these powers,
We know what is meant
By the wise serpent,
By the gentle dove,
And remember then
How we wish to love.
Let us rejoice now
In these great powers
Which are ours alone.
And trust what we know:
First the green hand
That can open flowers
In the deathly bone,
And the magic breast
That can feed the child,
And is under a hand
A rose of fire in snow
So tender, so wild
All fires come to rest,
All lives can be blest—
So sighs the gentle dove,
Wily the serpent so,
Matched in a woman’s love.
III
Eve and Mary the mother are our stem;
All our centuries go back to them.
And delicate the balance lies
Between the passionate and wise:
Of man’s rib, one, and cleaves to him;
And one bears man and then frees him.
This double river has created us,
Always the re-discovered, always the cherished.
(But many fail in this. Many have perished).
Hell is the loss of balance when woman is destroyer.
Each of us has been there.
Each of us knows what the floods can do.
How many women mother their husbands
Out of all strength and secret Virtu;
How many women love an only son
As a lover loves, binding the free hands.
How many yield up their true power
Out of weakness, the moment of passion
Betrayed by years of confused living—
For it is surely a lifetime work,
This learning to be a woman.
Until at the end what is clear
Is the marvelous skill to make
Life grow in all its forms,
Is knowing where to ask, where to yield,
Where to sow, where to plough the field,
Where to kill the heart or let it live;
To be Eve, the giver of knowledge, the lover;
To be Mary, the shield, the healer and the mother.
The balance is eternal whatever we may wish;
The law can be broken but we cannot change
What is supremely beautiful and strange.
Where find the root? Where re-join the source?
The fertile feminine goddess, double river?
IV
We think of all the women hunting for themselves,
Turning and turning to each other with a driving
Need to learn to understand, to live in charity,
And above all to be used fully, to be giving
From wholeness, wholeness back to love’s deep clarity.
O, all the burning hearts of women unappe
ased
Shine like great stars, like flowers of fire,
As the sun goes and darkness opens all desire—
And we are with a fierce compassion seized.
How lost, how far from home, how parted from
The earth, my sisters, O my sisters, we have come.
For so long asked so little of ourselves and men,
And let the Furies have their way—our treasure,
The single antidote to all our world’s confusion,
A few gifts to the poor small god of pleasure.
The god of passion has gone back into the mountain,
Is sleeping in the dark, deep in the earth.
We have betrayed a million times the holy fountain,
The potent spirit who brings his life to birth,
The masculine and violent joy of pure creation—
And yielded up the sacred fires to sensation.
But we shall never come home to the earth
Until we bring the great god and his mirth
Back from the mountain, until we let this stranger
Plough deep into our hearts his joy and anger,
And we shall never find ourselves again
Until we ask men’s greatness back from men,
Until we make the fertile god our own,
And giving up our lives, receive his own.
LOVE POEMS
THE LADY AND THE UNICORN
The Cluny Tapestries
I am the unicorn and bow my head
You are the lady woven into history
And here forever we are bound in mystery
Our wine, Imagination, and our bread,
And I the unicorn who bows his head.
You are all interwoven in my history
And you and I have been most strangely wed
I am the unicorn and bow my head
And lay my wildness down upon your knee
You are the lady woven into history.
And here forever we are sweetly wed
With flowers and rabbits in the tapestry
You are the lady woven into history
Imagination is our bridal bed:
We lie ghostly upon it, no word said.
Among the flowers of the tapestry
I am the unicorn and by your bed
Come gently, gently to bow down my head,
Lay at your side this love, this mystery,
And call you lady of my tapestry.
I am the unicorn and bow my head
To one so sweetly lost, so strangely wed:
You sit forever under a small formal tree
Where I forever search your eyes to be
Rewarded with this shining of our tragedy
And know your beauty was not cast for me,
Know we are woven all in mystery,
The wound imagined where no one has bled,
My wild love chastened to this history
Where I before your eyes, bow down my head.
SPRING SONG
When I came here in the evening
Long long ago
The apple blossoms foamed
Under my window,
Stiff coral branches, rich and still,
So still and fair,
It seemed a holy presence floated
On green air.
And that night peace was with me
For I did not know
That I would wake to find those riches melted
All like snow,
All gone, and the whole orchard green
Instead of white,
My love, my love, the fruit already knotted
After a single night.
THE HARVEST
Earth opens to the eyes
As though never seen,
All new, all fresh surprise
Greener than green
Where crystal streams are flowing
Through velvet banks,
Grass under water glowing:
The roots give thanks.
Within the cottonwood
Leaves, water-bright,
Glitter as if rain shook
Down drops of light.
And our hearts tired
By the blaze within
See all that they desired
Fulfilled in green.
The cobalt mountains stand
Above all passing hours
And we are hand in hand
Like elements or flowers.
For after love comes birth:
All we have felt and said
Is now of air, of earth,
And love is harvested.
DEFINITION OF LOVE
Not so much terrible as pure,
So pure it is nothing. It is alone.
Not so much pure perhaps as round,
Round as a note empty and sure,
Not so much pure and round as There,
Stripped like the almond-stone,
The nerve of the leaf, the heart-beat
Which is life itself, beyond sense,
Beyond feeling, neither harsh nor sweet,
The attar of being, essence of essence,
Not so much terrible as pure.
SONG
When I imagine what to give you
It is always silence, silence that falls
Like dark through the leaves, like dew
On the strawberry early in the morning,
Silence like deep cool wells
In a desert treeless and burning,
O my darling, O my darling.
When I imagine how and what to send
It is never the leaden weight of a word,
Not such a weight, world without end.
A god could do with a leaf or a bird,
A god could pour out love
In a silent shower of gold:
Images and symbols are all I have,
O my child, O my child.
MAGNET
I am becoming very heavy here alone:
Stones must feel gravity like this,
To be nothing, nothing but a heaviness
Leaning and leaning toward stone.
This is the full weight of a kiss
That was as subtle as a leaf’s caress.
So light I lay upon your fragile breast,
So heavy now the fiery buried stream,
So heavy now the eyes within my head,
The long sigh of the flesh that cannot rest,
The weight unbearable, implacable, extreme
Of bones that creak with longing for their bed,
And earth as well as you now holds me fast.
My body leans toward you, plangent,
Falls heavy and straight as a meteor
That hurls the night apart without a tangent
To find the point of gravity where you are.
QUESTION
I saw the world in your face
And it was fearful loneliness,
As if the self were in disgrace;
I saw the heart of emptiness
And thought that I was fashioned then
To be the mirror of your pain.
To be the witness only, be
The mirror, the crystalline eye
That treats grief as anatomy
To read the world’s ill by,
The haunted witness of
Our lack of love, our lack of love.
But now I move with you as one,
The ghost within your skeleton,
And ask and ask the only question:
How can we live and this go on?
How shall the naked starving soul
Be fed, be clothed, and be made whole?
My child, my world, my dear,
Balm of my heart, joy so severe
You hold within a single tear
All of our human anguish clear,
How will this arduous joy you have
Be yours, be mine, without your love?
When will you give yourself all that you are,
O world of
pain, O lucid morning star?
THREE SONNETS
I
Is your heart stiff and sore parted from me
As mine in this strange absence from your love,
As if it were enlarged and could not more
Except with pain, it beats so heavily?
And is your mind so charged with loneliness
Nothing you look upon is real or fair?
As mine that knows a constant still despair
As if this garden were a wilderness,
And the familiar flowers suddenly strange,
The tree I loved now frightening and unknown
Standing beside me when I walk alone,
And all my thoughts diminished in their range
To the one piercing thought: I am divided
From one whose love for me is undecided.
II
All joys are sharper now I am in pain;
I understand the depths of happiness
And I have visions and am young again,
As when accompanied by your loveliness
I seemed to understand and wished to share
The depths of sorrow and was close to grief,
Felt my heart open to the world’s despair—
O, when you loved me great was my belief,
My need to serve, and sweet was this desire,
For happiness was something that I had
And the pure tears rose softly from the fire,
But now that I am less wise, being sad,
Joy is so sharp a memory, that my faith
Seems bound up in the drawing of your breath.
III
The doubts move inward as the circle narrows;
We have left the world now. It is not the world
That pierces us with these hard-driven arrows,
But heart against heart is now naked hurled.
They jar upon each other and the blow
Bruises both equally, so close they are;
For now we see there is no separate sorrow
In this strange union and this stranger war,
Where two so bound by love, they feel as one
Are rigid with a power that still denies—
The tension grows. The circle narrows down,
Until it is two pairs of haunted eyes:
By love bound, by love wounded, still we stand
Like two Sebastians, pierced, and hand in hand.
PERSPECTIVE
Now I am coming toward you silently,
Do not say anything. Stay as you are—
Suspense between my love and your despair.
Like a stone figure on a fountain, be