by May Sarton
The Lion and the Rose
Poems
May Sarton
IN MEMORIAM
RICHARD CABOT AND LUGNÉ-POE
Contents
Publisher’s Note
I THEME AND VARIATIONS
Meditation in Sunlight
Difficult Scene
The Window
The Lion and The Rose
II AMERICAN LANDSCAPES
Winchester, Virginia
Monticello
In Deep Concern
Charleston Plantations
Where The Peacock Cried
In Texas
Boulder Dam
Colorado Mountains
Of The Seasons
Indian Dances
Santos: New Mexico
Poet in Residence (1-5)
III THE WORK OF HAPPINESS
New Year Wishes
Definition
Song: No, I will never forget you
The Work of Happiness
After a Train Journey
Night Storm
O Who Can Tell?
The Clavichord
Song: Now let us honor
The White-Haired Man
In That Deep Wood
In Memoriam (1-3)
Poem in Autumn
Now Voyager
My Sisters, O My Sisters (1-4)
IV LOVE POEMS
The Lady and The Unicorn
Spring Song
The Harvest
Definition of Love
Song: When I imagine what to give you
Magnet
Question
Three Sonnets
Perspective
Return
“O Saisons! O Chateaux!”
V TO THE LIVING
These Pure Arches
We Have Seen The Wind
Homage to Flanders
The Sacred Order
What The Old Man Said
Not Always The Quiet Word
Roman Head
Navigator
Unlucky Soldier
Who Wakes
Return to Chartres
To The Living (1-4)
The Tortured
The Birthday
VI CELEBRATIONS
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.
THEME AND VARIATIONS:
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
MEDITATION IN SUNLIGHT
In
space in time I sit
Thousands of feet above
The sea and meditate
On solitude on love
Near all is brown and poor
Houses are made of earth
Sun opens every door
The city is a hearth
Far all is blue and strange
The sky looks down on snow
And meets the mountain range
Where time is light not shadow
Time in the heart held still
Space as the household god
And joy instead of will
Knows love as solitude
Knows solitude as love
Knows time as light not shadow
Thousands of feet above
The sea where I am now
Who wear an envelope
Of crystal air and learn
That space is also hope
Where sky and snow both burn
Where spring is love not weather
And I happy alone
The place the time together
The sun upon the stone.
DIFFICULT SCENE
This landscape does not speak,
Exists, is simply there.
Take it or leave it; the weak
Suffer from fierce air.
For these high desolate
Lands where earth is skeleton
Make no demands; they state.
Who can resist the stone?
Implacable tranquility
That searches out the naked heart,
Touches the quick of anxiety
And breaks the world apart.
The angel in the flaming air
Is everywhere and no escape,
Asking of life that it be pure
And given as the austere landscape.
And most accompanied when alone;
Most sensitive when mastered sense;
Alive most when the will is gone,
Absence become the greatest Presence.
The golden landscape cannot save,
It only asks your right to be here.
Live, if you do not break the wave
Of time mounting the holy air.
The flaming angel does not show
The path to any near salvation.
Live, if the sun burning the snow
Suggests that passion is compassion.
THE WINDOW
Finite, exact, the square
Frames the long curve
Of hills and perpendicular
Spray of the delicate tree.
Wires, slanting, swerve
Off the flat scene;
And shining through
The mathematical window
The burning sky and the blue sun
Create a flowing fourth dimension:
The square explodes in space.
Then through the abstract window
Darkness comes down so deep
The exact mountains show
Sleep in a flowing line,
Earth in a flowing sleep.
But suddenly alive
The rivers of the air
Invade the static square;
As the stars only move
Obedient to Love,
Heart opens into time.
The square explodes in space,
The window opens into time—
As poems breathe within their strict design,
As holiness may look out from a face.
THE LION AND THE ROSE
Vision is locked in stone.
The lion in the air is gone
With the great lion of the sun.
The sky is wild and cold.
The tawny fire is gone.
The hill where love did open like a rose
Is black. It snows.
Emptiness flows.
The flowers in the heart all close
Drowned in a heavy white. Love knows
That poverty untold,
The cave where nothing grows.
The flaming lions of the flesh are gone,
Their power withdrawn.
God of the empty room,
Thy will be done. Thy will be done.
Now shine the inward sun,
The beating heart that glows
Within the skeleton,
The magic rose, the purer living gold,
Shine now, grown old.
All that is young and bold,
The lion’s roar, the flaming skin and wild,
Unearthly peace now cherish and enfold
And fresh sleep overcome,
That in this death-in-life, delicate, cold,
The spiritual rose
Flower among the snows—
The love surpassing love.
AMERICAN LANDSCAPES
WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA
All day I had seen a nearer dot on the map, this town,
A night’s sleep and the end of speeding and climbing
The steep magnificent hills, a way of coming home.
It is a still town where the past lies dreaming.
Drenched in the old sun, washed in the gold light,
Orderly and gay with white sills gleaming
And brick that glows by day and frames the night.
It is a warm town where the past is living.
The ancient walls draw comfort from the ancient trees.
Their roots are bound together in the earth and breathing.
They wear their double beauty with a marvelous ease.
It is a deep town where the past is sleeping,
And in the silence on the sills the soldiers’ spurs
Are stilled and all the shouting and the women weeping
As the town is taken and lost in those unburied wars.
It is a strange town where the past is breathing.
For nothing is lost that has happened, nothing is over.
The traveller walking dark streets is silently leaving
His step beside Stonewall Jackson’s like a lover—
For all foresees him here and he remembers all and knows
That from this past the future rises streaming,
And from this town relationship is born and flows.
It is a good town where the past is growing
Into the whole stretch of the land and touches all
With warmth about the heart and gives a form to living,
A still town where the stranger listens to his footsteps fall.
MONTICELLO
This legendary house, this dear enchanted tomb,
Once so supremely lived in and for life designed,
Will none of mouldy death nor give it room,
Charged with the presence of a living mind.
Enter and touch the temper of a lively man.
See, it is spacious, intimate and full of light.
The eye, pleased by detail, is nourished by the plan;
Nothing is here for show, much for delight.
All the joy of invention and of craft and wit
Are freely granted here, all given rein,
But taut within the classic form and ruled by it,
Elegant, various, magnificent—and plain,
Europe become implacably American!
But Mozart still could have been happy here,
And Monroe riding from his farm again,
As well as any silversmith or carpenter—
As well as we, for whom this elegance,
This freedom in a form, this peaceful grace
Is not our heritage, although it happened once:
We read the future, not the past, upon his face.
The time must come when, from the people’s heart,
Government grows to meet the stature of a man,
And freedom finds its form, that great unruly art,
And the state is a house designed by Jefferson.
IN DEEP CONCERN
Guilford College, North Carolina
Quakers define the hour when thoughts begin to burn,
That great turbulence of spirit, “a concern”,
The hour when contemplation breaks its bonds.
Poems are written, colleges are built, states live
When people go out from their thinking to the street
With a faith in their hands so deep and positive
It makes the vision truth. Here thought and action meet.
So the idea of a college, a hundred years ago,
Was born from Quakers’ deep concern, and with their hands
They dug and baked clay into bricks that warmly glow
Still with the heat of faith. That college stands.
But still we, later, are not sure. We are bound fast.
We do not know for certain. We have not got it clear:
Paul Revere rode, and Franklin went to France, John Brown
Was hanged because thought burned to action in the past,
Because thought grew so deep and hot it cast out fear.
And it is matter for concern whether we shall go down,
Or from the deeps of thought and prayer take up our stand
Where faith moves from the mind into the working hand.
CHARLESTON PLANTATIONS
You cannot see them from the road: go far and deep,
Down the long avenues where mosses cover up the leaves,
Across the empty terraced lawns neglected and asleep,
To the still place where no dog barks and no dove grieves,
And a black mirror gives you back your face too white
In pools dyed jet by cypress roots: go deep and far,
Deep into time, far into crumbling spaces and half-light
To where they stand, our Egypt and our Nineveh.
Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters’ houses.
The garlands and the little foxes’ faces carved
Upon the mantels look on empty walls and water-stains
And the stairs tremble though so elegantly curved,
(Outside are waiting the bright creeping vines)
And as your foot falls in the silences, you guess
Decay has been arrested for a moment in the wall
But the grey plumes upon the trees in deathly loveliness
Will stir when you have passed, and somewhere a stone fall.
