by May Sarton
There was a time for love’s imaginative face
And healing touch, for the deep searching eyes
That may behold the miracles of grace.
We could have beaten down the dangerous lies
If we had helped the helpless in their lonely stand,
And made a real peace, peace where no one dies,
And never watched the hearts spilt out on sand,
The best and dearest, the innumerable lost,
Nor come too late, too late to understand.
Now we must pay the full, the fearful cost,
Now we must fight the war we could have won
Without becoming what we hated most.
Now we must kill or perish. It is done.
And we fight for ourselves with little grace;
Who sold out human lives, now spend our own.
But through destruction fight back to the place
Where in the end the pure and healing touch,
The searching eyes and love’s long hidden face,
Turning toward us in our self-made desolation,
May teach us all through suffering so much
What might have been learned through imagination.
II
Who is the refugee,
The homesick one,
Climbing the long stairs of exile
And always alone?
Who is the wanderer,
At peace nowhere,
The burning leaf before hot winds
Blown here and there?
Who is the sick stranger
Whose thirst no well
In all the world can slake,
Nor fever, cool?
Who is the poor beggar
Bound in a cart
To wander everlasting desert sand
And eat his heart?
That thirst, that hunger and that homesickness,
The lonely burning day and sleepless night,
When all seemed desert-waste and bitterness
To be escaped in flight—
That never was escape, nor rest, nor sleep
But only long pursuit and pain—
Who has not known it? Who so wholly blest
Such loneliness could be to him unknown?
Each is an exile from the whole. The agony
Of separation is the human agony.
From the four corners of the earth
How bring us home into humanity?
How bring us home, how bring us home at last,
Who bear the old divisions of the past,
The ancient hatreds and the ancient evils
Held in the heart as if a thousand devils?
How exorcize, how purify, how bless
This fearful universal loneliness?
III
How faint the horn sounds in the mountain passes
Where folded in the folds of memory
All the heroic helmets lie in summer grasses,
Who wore them vanished utterly.
How dry the blood on ancient cross and stone
Where folded in the folds of memory
The martyrs cry out where each fails alone
In his last faithful agony.
How fresh and clear the stains of human weeping
Where folded in the folds of memory
The millions who have died for us are sleeping
In our long tragic history.
IV
The need to kill what is unknown and strange
Whether it be a poem or an ancient race,
The fear of thought, fear of experience
That might demand some radical heart-change—
These are the mountains that hem a narrow place
Out of the generous plains of our inheritance:
Speak to the children of the world as whole,
Whole as the heart that can include it all,
And of the fear of thought as the first sin;
Tell them the revolution is within.
Open the mind, and the whole earth and sky
Are freed from fear to be explored and known.
Nothing so strange it is does not hold delight
Once it is seen with clear and naked eye.
The thinking man will never be alone—
He travels where he sits, his heart alight:
Speak to the children of a living Greece
As real as Texas, and the whole earth a place
Where everywhere men hope and work to be
More greatly human and responsible and free.
Tell them the deepest changes rise like rivers
From hearts of men long dead; tell them that we
Are borne now on the currents of their faith—
The saints and martyrs and all great believers,
As well at Rome with Paul as at Thermopylae:
Our freedom rises from the body of this death.
Tell them the rivers are rich to overflowing
And as we love our fraction of the past in growing
These floods of change are to be loved and cherished;
That we may live, millions of men have perished.
Give them their rich, their full inheritance:
Open the whole past and see the future plain—
The long treks across China, all the voyages.
Look deep and know these were not done by chance.
Look far enough ahead and see the fruits of pain,
And see the harvests of all pilgrimages:
Speak to the children now of revolution
Not as a violence, a terror, and a dissolution,
But as the long-held hope and the long dream of man,
The river in his heart and his most pure tradition.
THE TORTURED
Cried innocence, “mother, my thumbs, my thumbs!
The pain will make me wild.”
And Wisdom answered, “Your brother-man
Is suffering, my child.”
Screamed Innocence, “Mother, my eyes, my eyes!
Someone is blinding me.”
And Wisdom answered, “Those are your brother’s eyes,
The blinded one is he.”
Cried Innocence, “Mother, my heart, my heart!
It bursts with agony.”
And Wisdom answered, “That is your brother’s heart
Breaking upon a tree.”
Screamed Innocence, “Mother, I want to die.
I cannot bear the pain.”
And Wisdom answered, “They will not let him die.
They bring him back again.”
Cried Innocence, “Mother, I cannot bear
It now. My flesh is wild!”
And Wisdom answered, “His agony is endless
For your sake, my child.”
Then whispered Innocence, “Mother, forgive,
Forgive my sin, forgive—”
And Wisdom wept. “Now do you understand, Love,
How you must live?”
THE BIRTHDAY
What shall we give The Child this day,
On this shining day
In a starving world,
What gifts, what toys, for this, Love’s dearest birthday?
For gold, give the heart’s hunger,
The heart’s want give for myrrh,
For hunger and want are stronger
And purer and deeper than anything
We have, than any joy we sing.
These and one more, the third,
These and one saving grace,
The balsam-scented word,
Green in the desolate place;
Give to His Innocence
Our hope for frankincense.
Now lay down thirst and hunger
There in the lonely manger,
And in the desolate place
Lay the green saving grace,
The bough without a thorn,
For God in man is born;
Out of all grief and pain,
Love, be renewed again!
&n
bsp; CELEBRATIONS
From all creators everywhere in this time,
Now raised to the great burning, the great loneliness, the great communion,
Where the dead greet the living, the living salute the unborn,
May relationship and communication rise.
For all creators everywhere in this time,
For what can be built from dislocation,
(The deep shelters where people meet under the ruined city),
For insight wrenched from complexity like the gasp of pain,
For all intensities that burn through walls,
For cross-fertilizations, meetings under stress,
When the moment holds all, in and out of time,
And hearts explode and break paths across foreign skies,
For all creators everywhere in this time,
Building out of bomb-craters, reservoirs,
Many kinds of life out of many kinds of death,
May this year celebrate,
May the people alive in this year know—
And that further limitations release deeper powers.
For all creators everywhere in this time—
Specifically, friends, who out of darkness and in the cold, write letters carrying hope across the world,
Who recognize the building of relationship, and that now
The most intimate and private must not be lost
As the horizons widen, but only borne out toward the places
Where heart meets the whole sky and includes the earth.
Specifically, the teachers, cut off on isolated hills,
The hungers disciplined, the love translated and fused into the future,
The love given over and over, uncounted like a blessing.
Specifically, the scientist, whose fires are banked to patience,
Who holds his hope back for testing and re-testing,
Seeing the whole in fragments, making connections.
Specifically, the women, not shelters now but spires,
Keeping the relation clear between earth and sky.
Specifically, the lovers, whose love is raised to a white meridian
Where passion and compassion fuse, fire and tears are one,
And the most lucid blaze, the blazing crystallize
Their peace from fragments.
For all creators everywhere in this time,
For all those who design the forms of freedom in many ways,
The statesman, teacher, poet, soldier, architect, mother—
These are professions. The people involved in these professions
Profess belief, move from faith, act to plan, set chaos in a fiery glass
Where the future can be seen, organic, healthy as a plant,
Where further limitations release deeper powers,
Where relationship and communication rise—
These celebrations.
A Biography of May Sarton
May Sarton (1912–1995) was born Eleanore Marie Sarton on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, the only child of the science historian George Sarton and the English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes. Barely two years later, Sarton’s European childhood was interrupted by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the onset of the First World War.
Fleeing the advancing Germans, the family moved briefly to Ipswich, England, and then in 1915 to Boston, Massachusetts, where her father had accepted a position at Harvard University. Sarton’s love for poetry was first kindled at the progressive Shady Hill School, a period she wrote about extensively in I Knew a Phoenix, published in 1959.
At the age of twelve, Sarton traveled to Belgium for a year to live with friends of the family and study at the Institut Belge de Culture Française. There, she met the school’s founder, Marie Closset, who grew to be Sarton’s close friend and mentor, and who was the inspiration for her first novel, The Single Hound (1938).
On returning to the States, Sarton graduated from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929. Although she was awarded a scholarship to Vassar College, Sarton joined actress Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York instead, much to the dismay of her father. However, while learning the basics of theater, Sarton continued to develop her poems, and in 1930, when she was just eighteen, a series of her sonnets was published in Poetry magazine.
In 1931, Sarton returned to Europe and lived in Paris for a year while her parents were in Lebanon. In large part, Europe provided the backdrop for her encounters with the great thinkers of the age, including the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the famed biologist Julian Huxley, and of course, Virginia Woolf. After Sarton’s own theater company failed during the Great Depression, she turned her full attention to writing and published her first poetry collection, entitled Encounter in April, in 1937.
For the next decade, Sarton continued to write and publish novels and poetry. In 1945, she met Judy Matlack in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the two became partners for the next thirteen years, during which she would suffer the deaths of several loved ones: her mother in 1950, Marie Closset in 1952, and her father in 1956. Following this last loss, Sarton’s relationship fell apart, and she moved to New Hampshire to start over. She was, however, to remain attached to Matlack for the rest of her life, and Matlack’s death in 1983 affected her keenly. Honey in the Hive, published in 1988, is about their relationship.
While the 1950s were a time of great personal upheaval for Sarton, they were a time of success in equal measure. In 1956, her novel Faithful Are the Wounds was nominated for a National Book Award, followed by nominations in 1958 for The Birth of a Grandfather and a volume of poetry, In Time Like Air; some consider the latter to be one of Sarton’s best books of poetry. In 1965, she published Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, which is frequently referred to as her coming-out novel. From then on, her work became a key point of reference in the fields of feminist and LGBT literature. Strongly opposed to being categorized as a lesbian writer, Sarton constantly strove to ensure that her portraits of humanity were relatable to a universal audience, regardless of readers’ sexual identities.
In 1974, Sarton published her first children’s book, Punch’s Secret, followed by A Walk Through the Woods in 1976. During the seventies, Sarton was diagnosed with breast cancer—the beginning of a long and arduous illness. However, she continued to work during this difficult period and received a spate of critical acclaim for her literary contributions.
In 1990, she suffered a severe stroke that reduced her concentration span and her ability to write, although she did continue to dictate her journals when she could. Sarton died of breast cancer on July 16, 1995. She is buried in Nelson, New Hampshire.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1948 by May Sarton
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4804-7448-2
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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May Sarton, The Lion and the Rose