How can we name it “fall,” this slow ascent
From dawn to dawn, each purer than the last,
As structure comes back through the golden tent
And shimmering color floats down to be lost?
How can we name it “fall,” this elevation
As all our earthly shelter drops away
And we stand poised as if for revelation
On the brink of another startling day,
And still must live with ever greater height,
And skies more huge and luminous at dusk,
Till we are strained by light and still more light
As if this progress were an imposed task
Demanding of love supreme clarity,
Impersonal, stark as the winter sky.
Everywhere, in my garden, in my thought
I batten down, shore up, and prune severely.
All tender plants are cut down to the root.
My gentle earth is barren now, or nearly.
Harden it well against the loss and change;
Prepare to hold the fastness, since I know
This open self must grow more harsh and strange
Before it meets the softness of the snow.
Withstand, endure, the worst is still to come.
Wild animals seek shelter from the cold,
But I am as exposed here safe at home
As the wild fox running outside the fold:
He burns his brightness for mere food or bed.
I contain love as if it were a warhead.
Pruning the Orchard
Out there in the orchard they have come
To prune the overgrowth, cut back and free
The crisscrossed branches of apple and plum,
Shaping the formless back to symmetry.
They do not work for beauty’s sake
But to improve the harvest come next year.
Each tough lopsided branch they choose to break
Is broken toward fruit more crisp and rare.
I watch them, full of wonder and dismay,
Feeling the need to shape my life, be calm,
Like the untroubled pruners who, all day,
Cut back, are ruthless, and without a qualm.
While I, beleaguered, always conscience-torn,
Have let the thickets stifle peaceful growth,
Spontaneous flow stopped, poems stillborn,
Imagined duties, pebbles in my mouth.
Muse, pour strength into my pruning wrist
That I may cut the way toward open space,
A timeless orchard, poetry-possessed,
There without guilt to contemplate your face.
Old Lovers at the Ballet
In the dark theatre lovers sit
Watching the supple dancers weave
A fugue, motion and music melded.
There on the stage below, brilliantly lit
No dancer stumbles or may grieve;
Their very smiles are disciplined and moulded.
And in the dark old lovers feel dismay
Watching the ardent bodies leap and freeze,
Thinking how age has changed them and has mocked.
Once they were light and bold in lissome play,
Limber as willows that could bend with ease—
But as they watch a vision is unlocked.
Imagination springs the trap of youth.
And in the dark motionless, as they stare,
Old lovers reach new wonders and new answers
As in the mind they leap to catch the truth,
For young the soul was awkward, unaware,
That claps its hands now with the supple dancers.
And in the flesh those dancers cannot spare
What the old lovers have had time to learn,
That the soul is a lithe and serene athlete
That deepens touch upon the darkening air.
It is not energy but light they burn,
The radiant powers of the Paraclete.
IV
Sark
The isle is for islanders, some born—
They like being surrounded by
And anchored in the ever-changing sea,
For it is just this being enclosed
In a small space within a huge space
That makes them feel both safe and free,
Tilling small fields under a huge sky.
The isle is for islanders, some made—
They are drawn here, the two-in-one,
To be alone together, hand in hand,
Walking the silence of the high plateau
Where bees and heather marry well,
Or down long flights of stairs to caves.
Love is the summer island, safe and wild.
Islands are for people who are islands,
Who have always been detached from the main
For a purpose, or because they crave
The free within the framed as poets do,
The solitary for whom being alone
Is not a loneliness but fertile good.
Here on this island I feel myself at home.
And because I am here, happy among the bees,
A donkey in the field, the crooked paths
That lead me always to some precipitous fall
And the sudden opening out of blue below,
Hope flows back into my crannies now.
I am ready to begin the long journey
Toward love, the mainland, perhaps not alone.
In Suffolk
Mourning my old ways, guilt fills the mind,
As memories well up from ripening gold
And I look far away over tilted land
Watching splashed light and shadow on the fold
Where restless clouds flock over and disband.
To what have I been faithful in the end?
What lover loved forever well or ill?
As clouds come over to darken a line of trees
And then far off shadow a wooded hill,
I have to answer, “faithful only to these,
To earth itself turning toward the fall,
To earth’s relentless changing mysteries.”
All lovers sow and reap their harvests from
This flesh ever to be renewed and reconceived
As the bright ploughs break open the dark loam.
Whatever the cost and whatever I believed,
Only the earth itself, great honeycomb,
Gives comfort to the many times bereaved.
Whatever cloud comes over with black rain
To make my life seem of so little worth,
To cover the bright gold with guilt and pain,
The poem, life itself, labor of birth
Has been forced back again and again
To find renewal in the fertile earth.
Fidelity to what? To a gnarled tree, a root,
To the necessity for growth and discipline.
Now I am old why mourn what had to go?
Despite the loss and so much fallen fruit,
The harvest is so rich it fills my bin.
What had to grow has been allowed to grow.
A Winter Notebook
1
Low tide—
The sea’s slow motion,
The surge and slur
Over rocky shingle.
A few gulls ride
Rocking-horse waves.
Under blurred gray sky
The field shines white.
2
I am not available
At the moment
Except to myself.
Downstairs the plumber
Is emptying the big tank,
Water-logged.
The pump pumped on and on
And might have worn out.
So many lives pour into this house,
Sometimes I get too full;
The pump wears out.
So now I am emptying the tank.
It is not an illness
That keeps me from writing.
I am simply staying alive
As one does
At times by taking in,
At times by shutting out.
3
I wake in a wide room
Before dawn,
Just a little light framed by three windows.
I wake in a large space
Listening to the gentle hush of waves.
I watch the sea open like a flower
A huge blue flower
As the sun rises
Out of the dark.
4
It is dark when I go downstairs
And always the same shiver
As I turn on the light—
There they are, alive in the cold,
Hyacinths, begonias,
Cyclamen, a cloud of bloom
As though they were birds
Settled for a moment in the big window.
I wake my hand, still half asleep,
With a sweet geranium leaf.
After breakfast
I tend to all their needs,
These extravagant joys,
Become a little drunk on green
And the smell of earth.
We have lived through another
Bitter cold night.
5
On this dark cold morning
After the ice storm
A male pheasant
Steps precisely across the snow.
His red and gold,
The warmth and shine of him
In the white freeze,
Explosive!
A firecracker pheasant
Opens the new year.
6
I sit at my desk under attack,
Trying to survive
Panic and guilt, the flu…
Outside
Even sunlight looks cold
Glancing off glare ice.
Inside,
Narcissus in bloom,
And a patch of sun on the pile
Of unanswered letters.
I lift my eyes
To the blue
Open-ended ocean.
Why worry?
Some things are always there.
7
The ornamental cherry
Is alive
With cedar waxwings,
Their dandy crests silhouetted
Against gray sky.
They are after cherries,
Dark-red jewels
In frozen clusters
On the asymmetrical twigs.
In the waste of dirty snow
The scene is as brilliant
As a Rajput painting.
I note the yellow-banded tail feathers,
A vermilion accent on the wing—
What elegance!
8
The dark islands
Float on a silvery sea.
I see them like a mirage
Through the branches of the great oak.
After the leaves come out
They will be gone—
These winter joys
And snow coming tonight.
Of the Muse
There is no poetry in lies,
But in crude honesty
There is hope for poetry.
For a long time now
I have been deprived of it
Because of pride,
Would not allow myself
The impossible.
Today, I have learned
That to become
A great, cracked,
Wide-open door
Into nowhere
Is wisdom.
When I was young,
I misunderstood
The Muse.
I can be glad of her
As one is glad of the light.
We do not thank the light,
But rejoice in what we see
Because of it.
What I see today
Is the snow falling:
All things are made new.
Index
After All These Years, 17
After all these years 17
After the Storm, 42
After you have gone 28
Airs Above the Ground, 13
Along a Brook,, 33
Anger’s the beast in me 37
As the tide rises, the closed mollusk 44
At the Black Rock, 37
Autumn Sonnets, 39
Balcony, The, 22
Beggar, Queen, and Ghost, 34
Blurred as though it has been woken 21
Control, 32
Country of Pain, The, 35
First Autumn, 27
Fragile as a spider’s web 43
Geese, The, 48
Give me a love 18
Halfway to Silence, 5
Hold the tiger fast in check 32
How can we name it “fall,” this slow ascent 49
I carried two things around in my mind 25
I have been a beggar with a begging bowl 34
In all the summer glut of green 46
In Suffolk, 46
In the country of pain we are each alone 35
In the dark theatre lovers sit 51
I was halfway to silence 5
I watched wind ripple the field’s supple grasses 45
Jealousy, 31
June Wind, 45
Lady of the Lake, The, 26
Late Autumn, 47
Love, 43
Lover of silence, muse of the mysteries 22
Love waits for a turning of the wind 41
Low tide 57
Mal du Départ, 28
Mourning my old ways, guilt fills the mind 56
Myths Return, The, 23
Now in this armature 23
Of Molluscs, 44
Of the Muse, 61
Old Lovers at the Ballet, 51
Old Trees, 20
Old trees 20
On random wires the rows of summer swallows 47
On Sark, 55
Oriole, The, 19
Out of Touch, 36
Out there in the orchard they have come 50
Pruning the Orchard, 50
Somewhere at the bottom of the lake she is 26
Summer Tree, The, 46
The geese honked overhead 48
The isle is for islanders, some born 55
There is no poetry in lies 61
The roar of big surf and above it all night 42
The source is silted 36
The white horse floats above the field 13
Three Things, 25
Time for Rich Silence, 24
Time for rich silence 24
Turning of the Wind, The, 41
Two Songs, 18
Voice, A, 21
Water over sand 33
What do the trees in the window have to tell 27
What other lover 18
When I was a child 31
When maples wear their aureole 19
Winter Notebook, A, 57
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.