by May Sarton
Halfway to Silence
Poems
May Sarton
Contents
Publisher’s Note
Airs above the ground
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 complete line, while the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn” is not.
Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.
Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.
Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to feel assured that the way the lines appear on the screen is an accurate embodiment of the way the author wants the lines to sound. Ever since poems began to be written down, the manner in which they ought to be written down has seemed equivocal; ambiguities have always resulted. By taking advantage of the technologies available in our time, our goal is to deliver the most satisfying reading experience possible.
Halfway to Silence
I was halfway to silence
Halfway to land’s end
When I heard your voice.
Shall I take you with me?
Shall we go together
All the way to silence,
All the way to land’s end?
Is there a choice?
Airs Above the Ground
(Lippizan horse in Central Park)
The white horse floats above the field,
Pegasus in a child’s dream by Chagall
Where gravity itself is forced to yield—
Oh marvelous beast who cannot ever fall!
The horse might have been sculpted flying there;
The muscles look engraved, taut flowing powers;
A furious gallop arrested in mid-air
Towers over the city’s distant towers—
So wild and beautiful we have to laugh,
We have to weep. What is this caracole
That moves us with the strangeness of great art?
Dressage, control create a miracle.
&nb
sp; Taught through the ages first to terrify,
To make foot soldiers turn their backs and scream
Before a stallion turned loose in the sky,
And now to bring us back to a lost dream—
What is released by concentrated hours,
The long dressage to catch a chancy rhyme,
And craft that may sometimes harness strange powers,
Those airs above the ground that banish time.
After All These Years
After all these years
When all I could caress
Was dog head and dog ears
When all that came to bless
Was cat with her loud purrs,
With what joy and what quake
I kiss small naked ears
And stroke a marble cheek,
After all these years
Let sleeping beauty wake.
Two Songs
1
Give me a love
That has never been,
Deeper than thought.
Bring earth alive,
The desert green
After long drought.
In the flesh, leaf,
In the bones, root,
The gardener’s hand
Untangles grief,
Invents a land.
2
What other lover
Could ever displace
Despair with all-heal,
Or help me uncover
Sweet herb-of-grace
In the desolate field?
None had your face—
So pure in its poise,
So closed in its power,
That disciplined place
Where the tragic joys
Flower and re-flower.
The Oriole
When maples wear their aureole
Of gauzy green,
Then, only once, I heard the oriole
But rarely seen.
So it was when I found a home
After long unrest,
So it is once more now love has come
To hold me fast.
At the top of the great oak
As I said your name,
We saw him. He was there. He spoke.
The bird of flame.
Old Trees
Old trees—
How exquisite the white blossom
On the gnarled branch!
Thickened trunk, erratic shape
Battered by winter winds,
Bent in the long cold.
Young ones may please
The aesthete,
But old trees—
The miracle of their flowering
Against such odds—
Bring healing.
Let us praise them,
And sing hosannahs
As the small buds grow red
Just before they open.
A Voice
Blurred as though it has been woken
From an underground and secret river,
This voice itself and not the language spoken
Has made the air around me shiver.
Seductive sound, mysterious chord
That speaks its message in the very timbre
And not in a to be deciphered word
That I might hunt down or remember.
It wanders through my dreams and there I learn
I have to make the journey, have to go,
Whatever I must change or overturn
To reach the source, so strong this undertow.
Like a tapped glass the shivered air
Echoes and echoes a single poignant note.
That voice, where does it live? I must go there,
Comfort, entreat, and bless the magic throat.
The Balcony
after Baudelaire
Lover of silence, muse of the mysteries,
You will remember how we supped each night
There on your balcony high in the trees
Where a heraldic lion took late light,
Lover of silence, muse of the mysteries.
The big dogs slumbered near us like good bears;
The old cat begged a morsel from my plate,
And all around leaves stirred in the warm airs
Breathed from the valley as the red sun set.
The big dogs slumbered near us like good bears.
I thought of all the pain and how we met
Late in our lives yet lavishly at ease,
Having assumed an end to old regret
In the eternal present of the trees—
I thought of all the pain and how we met.
There every night we drank deep of the wine
And of our love, still without history,
Yet the completion of some real design
Earned with much thought, muse of the mystery.
There every night we drank deep of the wine.
While out of deprivation a huge flower,
The evening’s passion, was about to bloom.
Such intimacy held us in its power
The long years vanished in a little room,
And out of deprivation, a huge flower.
The Myths Return
Now in this armature
Where the tide rose and rose
Till every crack was filled,
Long echoes still
Reverberate in the hollow cave,
And the walls tremble.
Poseidon
Catching a dolphin
Must have laughed in his fierce joy.
Eons ago
Sacred and creaturely married,
And still those great tides ebb and flow—
As we now know.
Time for Rich Silence
Time for rich silence,
The passionate season,
For the present tense
Beyond speech, outside reason.
Time now to explore
These intricate cages,
Two bodies aware,
Two equipages.
Find the way to unlock
A mysterious door
At the threshold of shock
With the impact of war.
Then gentle fierce joys
On the wave’s rising curve
Till it reaches it poise,
Tumbles, touches the nerve.
And all tumult is done—
Two equipages
In silent communion
Released from their cages.
Three Things
I carried two things around in my mind
Walking the woods and thinking how to say
Shiver of poplar leaves in a light wind,
Threshing of water over tumbled stones,
A brook rippling its interrupted way—
Two things that bring a tremor to the bones.
And now I carry around in my head a third.
The force of it stops me as I walk the wood,
Three things for which no one has found a word—
Wind in the poplar, tremor under the skin
Deep in the flesh, a shiver of more than blood
When lovers, water, and leaves are wholly one.
The Lady of the Lake
Somewhere at the bottom of the lake she is
Entangled among weeds, her deep self drowned.
I cannot be with her there. I know she is bound
To a dead man. Her wide open eyes are his.
Only a part of her surfaces in my arms
When I can lift her up and float her there
Gently to breathe life-giving natural air,
Wind in the leaves, the bright summer’s charms.
For I know I can be hers, hers for a while
But she can never be mine for a year or a day,
Long ago married, her deep self given away,
Though she turns to me sometimes with a luminous smile.
But what I cannot have or cannot keep
Draws me down under the waters, and I come
With h
im, with her, into a strange communion,
And all is well where the drowned lovers sleep.
First Autumn
What do the trees in the window have to tell
The lovers wrapped in their strange grief,
The lovers wrapped in their strange delight?
What do they hear in the rain, caught in its spell?