by May Sarton
The center of an arc of paths and trees.
Now I am coming toward you, freeze!
Be nothing but yourself, not even mine,
You as you are when all alone and free,
Suspended outside love and outside time—
Look at me as I am, as if I were a tree.
Now I am coming toward you, say nothing,
Shine in your own light, purer than my joy,
And I shall, coming toward you, make no cry,
But try to sense the nearness and the space
Between my windswept leaves and your still face,
Between the tree and the stone figure drawn
Together, if at all, by shadow or some simple dawn.
RETURN
It is time I came back to my real life
After this voyage to an island with no name,
Where I lay down at sunrise drunk with light.
Here are books, paper, and my little knife,
The walls of solitude from which I came,
Here is the sobering, meditative night,
The quiet room where it is dark and cool,
After the intense green and the flame,
The flat white walls, the table are each good.
Long hours of work and the imposed rule:
That was the time of the tremendous rain,
The place of lightning, of the great flood.
This is the time when voyagers return
With a mad longing for known customs and things,
Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
What was fire is music. Then the heart was torn.
But tears are indulgence. Memory sings.
I speak of an island. Passion is the word.
“O SAISONS! O CHATEAUX!”
When I landed it was coming home,
Home to all anguish, conflict and all love,
The heart stretched as the seasons move,
Summer is white roses and purple fox-glove,
Spring was a crimson tulip standing alone.
We only keep what we lose.
O seasons, O castles, O splendor of trees!
The star of avenues and the triumphant square,
And in the Metro once a woman with red hair,
The weary oval face and tense France there,
Too few roots now, too many memories.
We only keep what we lose.
The dark gloom of the forest and my dream,
The clouds that make the sky a tragic spell
And windows that frame partings in a well:
You bent down from a balcony to say farewell.
Across lost landscapes the trains scream.
We only keep what we lose.
Parting freezes the image, roots the heart.
Once spring was a tulip standing alone,
Summer is a forest of roses and green.
No one will see again what I have seen.
And I possess you now from whom I part:
We only keep what we lose.
TO THE LIVING
THESE PURE ARCHES
A painting by Chirico: “The Delights of The Poet”
Here space, time, peace are given a habitation,
Perspective of pillar and arch, shadow on light,
A luminous evening where it can never be night.
This is the pure splendor of imagination.
To hold eternally present and forever still
The always fugitive, to make the essence clear,
Compose time and the moment as shadow in a square,
As these pure arches have been composed by will.
As by a kind of absence, feat of super-session
We can evoke a face long lost, long lost in death,
Or those hidden now in the wilderness of oppression—
Know the immortal breath upon the mortal breath:
A leaping out of the body to think, the sense
Of absence that precedes the stem work of creation.
Now when the future depends on our imagination,
Remember these pure arches and their imminence,
The luminous scene where space and time are held
At peace forever. All lives will be in peril,
The love be wasted and the forms of peace be sterile
Unless the mandates of imagination are fulfilled.
WE HAVE SEEN THE WIND
New England Hurricane, 1938
We have seen the wind and we need not be warned.
It is no plunderer of roses. It is nothing sweet.
We have seen the torturer of trees, O we have learned
How it bends them, how it wrenches at their rooted feet,
Till the earth cracks like a cake round their torn feet.
We saw the strong trees struggle and their plumes go down,
The poplar bend and whip back till it split to fall,
The elm tear up at the root and topple like a crown,
The pine crack at the base—we had to watch them all.
The ash, the lovely cedar. We had to watch them fall.
They went so softly under the loud flails of air,
Before that fury they went down like feathers,
With all the hundred springs that flowered in their hair,
And all the years, endured in all the weathers—
To fall as if they were nothing, as if they were feathers.
Do not speak to us of the wind. We know now. We know.
We do not need any more of destruction than all these,
These that were proud and great and still so swift to go,
Do not speak to us any more of the carnage of the trees,
Lest the heart remember other dead than these—
Lest the heart split like a tree from root to crown,
And bearing all its springs, like a feather go down.
HOMAGE TO FLANDERS
Country of still canals, green willows, golden fields, all
Laid like a carpet for majestic winds to tread,
Where peace is in the lines of trees, but overhead
Heaven is marching: low lands where winds are tall,
Small lands where skies are the huge houses of the lark,
Rich lands where men are poor and reap what they have sown,
Who plant the small hugged acre where each works alone,
Men who rise with the sun and sleep with the early dark.
These are the country’s marrow, these, who work the land,
Passionate partisans and arguers but who still go on,
Whoever governs, planting the same seed under the same sun,
These who hold Flanders like a plough in the hand.
Their feet are rooted in earth but their hearts are moody,
Close to the dark skies, wind never still in their ears—
They were the battlefield of Europe for five hundred years.
The thunder may be guns. The skirts of the wind are bloody.
This land, this low land under threatening skies,
This Flanders full of skulls, has set a fury in the slow
Hearts of its people that, taking centuries to grow,
Now burns with a certain violence in their eyes.
It has made their land a passion which they must save
In every generation, spilling their blood to hold it.
Dogged and avaricious, they have never sold it.
Proud and fierce it has kept them. It has kept them brave.
Given their language coarseness, and a great breath
Of soldiers’ laughter from the belly and a flood
Of poetry that flows like war in the stream of their blood,
Slow and melancholy and half in love with death.
This was my father’s country and the country of my birth,
And isn’t it a strange thing that after the deliberate mind
Has yielded itself wholly to another land, stubborn and blind,
The heart gives its secret homage still to Flemish earth?
/>
I knew it when I was seven, after the war and years of slumber,
The Flemish self awoke as we entered the Scheldt, and suddenly,
The tears rushed to my eyes though all we could see
Was a low land under a huge sky that I did not remember.
THE SACRED ORDER
For George Sarton
Never forget this when the talk is clever:
Michelet suffered chaos in his bone
To bring to clarity the history of France.
His life-blood flowed into old documents.
The scholar at his desk burned like a lover.
At century’s end behold the sceptic rules;
Doubt, like the tyrant’s servants, seals
The visionary books. The scholar’s passion,
His burning heart is wholly out of fashion.
The human spirit goes, the caste prevails.
Urbane and foxy, the professors shut
Up Michelet in his coffin and abandon
To entomologists the wild and living truth
To pin down in their books like any moth.
The mandarins come in, the men go out.
Now is detachment the supreme holy word
(Above all take no part nor risk your head);
Forgotten are Erasmus’ pilgrimages
By these who fabricate and love their cages—
Has truth then never buckled on a sword?
Never forget this when the talk is clever:
Wisdom must be born in the flesh or wither,
And sacred order has been always won
From chaos by some burning faithful one
Whose human bones have ached as if with fever
To bring you to these high triumphant places.
Forget the formulas, remember men.
Praise scholars, for their never-ending story
Is written out in fire and this is their glory.
Read faith as on a lover’s in their faces.
WHAT THE OLD MAN SAID
For Lugné-Poe, founder of the Oeuvre Theatre in Paris
At sixty-five said, “I fight every day.
My dear, nothing but death will stop
My uninterrupted élan in the play.”
Then wrote, “When I am forced to see
What happens to our old humanity,
All seems ignoble and I rage
To have been listed player on this stage.”
At sixty-five that anger conquered fear:
The old man raged, but he did not despair.
At sixty-seven then he laughed and said,
“My dear, how proud I am of all the haters
Who stand behind and wish that I were dead,”
Those who had tasted of his honesty,
Those usurers of mediocrity—
At sixty-seven he refused to praise
(And lost his job) their rotten little plays.
But when he told me how he shouted there,
The old man laughed, but he did not despair.
He said at seventy, “But we must work, my dear.
I see a certain look upon their faces.
Discouragement? Perhaps I dream it there.
The wicked times have put me back to school,
And I shall die a sensitive young fool.
The news is doing me to death at last.”
And then a note, “The evil eats me fast.
You must help men not to be slaves, my dear!”
(The old man died, but he did not despair.)
NOT ALWAYS THE QUIET WORD
No, not always the quiet word,
Sometimes scabbards must split
On the leaping fire of the sword,
A Cromwell break from it.
No, not always calm thought
And mind in contemplation,
But clarity, white-hot,
Swift’s savage indignation.
Not always the silent, strong,
Who means more than he states,
Sometimes the passionate song,
Fierce Dante, bitter Yeats.
Not always statesmen steadfast,
Ice-cool before their work,
Sometimes the fiery blast,
The eloquence of Burke.
No, not always calm lovers
Compassionate and wise,
But the world-shakers and movers
With anger in their eyes.
And not always peace-choosers,
Sometimes imperfect, brave,
Uncompromising fighters
Are given a world to save.
ROMAN HEAD
First Century A.D.
An empire closing in
Clamps round the virile head,
As if he wore a crown,
As if the cropped hair weighed.
An open world of roads
Once branched out from his hand,
Now broken colonnades,
The arch sucked up by sand.
From those intense blank eyes
The intellect looks out
On nineteen centuries
And reads its own defeat.
This is the mortal head,
The fiery gloom on shade,
The master mastered
By the world he made.
This is the Roman head,
Riddled with self-despair,
By power corrupted—
The spirit fled to air,
The brittle glory fled.
NAVIGATOR
This lazy prince of tennis balls and lutes,
Marvelous redhead who could eat and have his cake,
Collector of hot jazz, Japanese prints, rare books,
The charming winner who takes all for the game’s sake,
Is now disciplined, changed and wrung into a man.
For war’s sake, in six months, this can be done.
Now he is groomed and cared for like a fighting-cock,
His blood enriched, his athlete’s nerve refined
In crucibles of tension to be electric under shock,
His intellect composed for action and designed
To map a bomber’s passage to Berlin by stars,
Precision’s instrument that neither doubts nor fears.
This can be done in six months. Take a marvelous boy
And knead him into manhood for destruction’s joy.
This can be done in six months, but we never tried
Until we needed the lute-player’s sweet life-blood.
O the composed mind and the electric nerve
Were never trained like this to build, to love, to serve.
Look at him now and swear by every bomb he will release,
This shall be done. This shall be better done in peace!
UNLUCKY SOLDIER
This is my friend, the fair Mozartian boy,
Gangling and gay and sudden as a bee,
Music his difficult passion and his joy,
Princely in fire and in humility.
Before he knew the pattern of his will
Or recognized his own life, he was given
To the harsh will of war, impersonal;
For three years up and down was driven,
Used and misused, the grace ground down,
The body hardened and the spirit dulled
Until rebellion and despair were overthrown—
And yet not wounded or in danger, not yet killed.
For three years I have watched him grow
And sweeten, laughing his way through Hell,
This so uncelebrated, so inglorious, so
Unlucky soldier whom many have loved well
For princely fire, whose gifts were gifts of wonder
Not death—those meant for living
The visions and the dreams he must plough under,
The harvests stolen from him, but forgiving.
(Not wounded, not yet killed, not yet in danger.)
If, after all, enduring all, he lives to know his will,
&nb
sp; Disarmed, he will appear a marvelous and potent stranger
To serve us well whom we have served so ill.
WHO WAKES
Detroit, June, 1943
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.
RETURN TO CHARTRES
We came to Chartres, riding the green plain,
The spear of hope, the incorruptible towers,
The great tree rooted in the heart of France
Blazing eternally with sacred flowers;
We came to Chartres, the house without a stain,
The mastery of passion by belief,
With all its aspiration held in balance;
We came to Chartres, the magic spear of grain,
The spear of wheat forever nourishing,
The never-wasted stalk, the ever blessing.
And there we meditated on our tragic age,
Split at the heart, flowering without a stem,
For we are barren men haunted by rage
Who cannot find our hope here though we came,
Now all the hope we have is human love:
Passion without belief destroys our love.
TO THE LIVING
I
Now we must kill or perish, desolate choice—
Indifference not hatred brought us to this place.
There was a time when charity still had a voice.