by May Sarton
As a child about poetry, about life, about myself;
It takes a long time for words to become thought,
For thought, the slow burner, to burn through
Into life where it can scorch the palm of a hand,
When what was merely beautiful or strange
Suffers the metamorphosis, the blood-change,
Looks out of eyes or walks down the street,
All that was abstract become concrete,
Is part of you like an eyelash or your hair;
You say “Poetry” and mean you have been there.
You are just beginning to understand
What it is all about, the imaginary land,
Say, “I can’t possibly describe the weather.
It’s as if the sky burned, was all on fire,
Ecstasy that makes ash of bodily desire—
But all I have to show is a stone and a blue feather.”
My children, you with whom I have learned so much,
Do not turn back to these hours; go forward,
Look to the fertile days and years ahead
When all that meaning and its implication,
The full tone and the half-tone and the whisper
Will sound together and keep the mind awake,
As after hearing a difficult quartet
The theme comes clear and you listen again
Long after you had thought you heard;
So it is with the deep thought, the deep word.
Now we are able only to graph the flight;
For we never actually rose from the ground,
Imagine a moment when student and teacher
(Long after the day and the lesson are over)
Will soar together to the pure immortal air
And find Yeats, Hopkins, Eliot waiting there.
But you understand, it cannot happen yet.
It takes a long time to live what you learn:
I believe we shall meet again and show each other
These curious marvels, the stone and the blue feather;
And we shall meet again when your own children are
Taught what they will not know for many a year.
PLACE OF LEARNING
Heavy, heavy the summer and its gloom,
The place, a place of learning, the difficult strange place,
And for what reason and from how far did you come,
To find the desolation and the thin soil,
To find the great heat and the sudden rain,
To listen for the long cry of the through train?
The time, a time of teaching, a curious time.
The birds alone made welcome in the morning sun
And all else strange. But this familiar, this well known,
This, in a sense, always the world where one moves
Opening the doors, opening the doors to push through alone,
And it is a way of many isolated deepening loves.
This we have known. It has been like this before.
The place of learning. The fear and trembling. The final opening of a door.
But here in the place of learning, in the time of teaching,
To find also, and surely not by accident,
Among the gifts of trees, of birds, the various gifts:
Coolness after long heat, a lightening sky after
Much heaviness, also to find—
The open heart, detached and open,
So feeling it has become impersonal as sunlight,
To find this curious one, creative and aloof:
From how far and for what reason did you come,
Stranger with a fire in your head, to this deep kind of welcome?
So what you gave was given and what you taught was learned,
Striking rock for water and the water falling from air,
Opening a door to find someone in the room, already there.
THE WORK OF HAPPINESS
NEW YEAR WISHES
May these delights be yours in the new year:
Above the pressure of chaotic fear,
Below the pressure of chaotic love—
An inward order set below, above.
Anxiety and passion both are sins
But pure creation is where joy begins.
But pure creation is where springs delight
Winged at birth and fully armed for flight,
The phoenix of the mind, who from despair,
Leaps to the radiant margins of the air:
These be your joys by the new year bestowed,
To make your raiment of celestial cloud.
Run down the forest-gamut of the notes to seize
(But never catch him) Mozart in the trees,
The prodigal, the flute-bird tossing songs
Into the timeless leaves in shining throngs.
To keep the book marked to the Rousseau-page
Where lies The Sleeping Gipsy’s entranced image,
His lute beside him, while the awed lion creeps
To sniff the marble quiet of this man who sleeps.
To keep another open so that Sabrina’s pool
May yield her up when the wild heart is cool,
And from the airy caverns of her wave,
That innocent, Imagination, rise and save.
This, the immaculate and ordered joy
Of pure creation, no trouble can destroy.
It is as nothing in the world can be
Absolved from change, the only certainty,
“The bracelet of bright hair about the bone”
That makes a living lover of the skeleton,
The timeless life, the fiery star that swings
In an eternal night and there forever sings.
DEFINITION
Match strictness to violence
Passion to formality
Before you learn the tense
Lesson life discovers
And your art imposes
You strange airy lovers
Imagination-driven
But held in the stern net
Difficult mind-woven
That you must suffer still
Till all that you might say
Is mastered by the will
To be words in a song
And all that you might feel
Translated to an image
Not real and more than real.
SONG
No, I will never forget you and your great eyes,
O animal and power.
You will be stalking
The wood where I am walking.
You will lie asleep
In the places where I weep,
And you will wake and move
In the first hour of love,
And in the second hour
Love flee before your power.
No, I will never forget you and your great eyes
Angel and challenger.
You will be there
Dressed in your wild hair
Angel and animal
Wherever I may dwell,
Wherever I may sleep
You have the dreams to keep.
Walking in the still landscape by the rock and the bone,
You will be beside me when I am most alone.
THE WORK OF HAPPINESS
I thought of happiness, how it is woven
Out of the silence in the empty house each day
And how it is not sudden and it is not given
But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.
No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark
Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.
No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,
But the tree is lifted by this inward work
And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.
So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours
And strikes its roots deep in the house alone:
The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,
Whi
te curtains softly and continually blown
As the free air moves quietly about the room;
A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall—
These are the dear familiar gods of home,
And here the work of faith can best be done,
The growing tree is green and musical.
For what is happiness but growth in peace,
The timeless sense of time when furniture
Has stood a life’s span in a single place,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness.
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
AFTER A TRAIN JOURNEY
My eyes are full of rivers and trees tonight,
The clear waters sprung in the green,
The swan’s neck flashing in sunlight,
The trees laced dark, the tiny unknown flowers,
Skies never still, shining and darkening the hours.
How can I tell you all that I have been?
My thoughts are rooted with the trees,
My thoughts flow with the stream.
They flow and are arrested as a frieze.
How can I answer now or tell my dream,
How tell you what is far and what is near?
Only that river, tree and swan are here.
Even at the slow rising of the full moon,
That delicate disturber of the soul,
I am so drenched in rivers and in trees,
I cannot speak. I have nothing to tell,
Except that I must learn of this pure solitude
All that I am and might be, root and bone,
Flowing and still and beautiful and good,
Now I am almost earth and almost whole.
NIGHT STORM
We watched the sky torn by the terrible light,
Bright presences whose jagged swords lash out
While their feet thunder on the stairs of cloud,
The flash of wings where light and darkness crowd.
We watched it all and, trembling, thought of Blake,
For whom these powers were angels and did speak.
The wings rushed past. The clouds were overthrown,
We lay there where the naked light leapt down,
Exposed to God’s impersonal and distant eyes
That gazed on us and on the Pleiades.
And then against your heart I leaned my fear
And heard it beat and knew that God was near:
The love that binds the stars’ sweet influence,
Heart-beat and thunder in a single Presence.
The angels did not speak a single word
And yet we were transfixed by what we heard.
O WHO CAN TELL?
What is experience, O who can tell?
Is it the senses holding the real world
To the heart’s ear as hands hold up a shell
To listen to the wave furled and unfurled?
What is it? Mind’s invention, human treasure,
An alchemy that plucks out joy from suffering,
Finds the hard stone at the core of pleasure,
Gently withdraws from guilt its waspish sting?
Is it the image, eyelid-flicker snapped
When lovers in suspension in the air
Know in one glance an island-world is mapped
Which each will secretly develop later?
The word is “later” when the senses yield
The meditative heart their curious plunder.
The inference is silence, where, distilled,
The wave unfurls and falls, translated wonder.
THE CLAVICHORD
She keeps her clavichord
As others keep delight, too light
To breathe, the secret word
No lover ever heard
Where the pure spirit lives
And garlands weaves.
To make the pure notes sigh
(Not of a human grief, too brief)
A sigh of such fragility
Her fingers’ sweet agility
Must hold the horizontal line
In the stern power of design.
The secret breathed within
And never spoken, woken
By music; the garlands in
Her hands no one has seen.
She wreathes the air with green
And weaves the stillness in.
SONG
Now let us honor with violin and flute
A woman set so deeply in devotion
That three times blasted to the root
Still she grew green and poured strength out.
Still she stood fair, providing the cool shade,
Compassion, the thousand leaves of mercy,
The cherishing green hope. Still like a tree she stood,
Clear comfort in the town and all the neighborhood.
Pure as the tree is pure, young
As the tree forever young, magnanimous
And natural, sweetly serving: for her the song,
For her the flute sound and the violin be strung.
For her all love, all praise,
All honor, as for trees
In the hot summer days.
THE WHITE-HAIRED MAN
For Richard Cabot
This man sowed faith wherever he moved.
It was in his hand when he held yours at meeting,
Never so called out of yourself, never so loved
Were you or anyone as by this man in greeting.
For he kept nothing of the thirsting flood.
It poured through him unstinted like a river,
A quickening essence transfused through the blood,
Afterwards strength was in you, he the giver.
For this man, each was given holiness in trust,
Each with a secret gift and none the same,
The gift of healing, healing because you must,
Because healing was in you in God’s name.
Never doubt. Never find it out too late,
But now flower and bear fruit in human meeting,
Love not transcending the person but incarnate
As in his own hand given you in greeting.
IN THAT DEEP WOOD
What forests have you known,
How deep within the dark groves gone
And by what paths, alone?
People with green-drenched eyes
And silver casques of hair, what is
The region of your mysteries?
How the first passage to that wood?
Under what avenues of beeches stood
Where silence poured itself into your blood?
That wilderness is always where we meet
And a cool shadow falls across your feet
As if the air were boughs over the street.
Although the city bells are loudly clanging
Defeat and terror, although doom is ringing,
In that dark wood the silences are singing,
In that deep wood a green and airy light
Preserves from time, from change, from war, from night
The wild and secret powers of delight.
IN MEMORIAM
I
“Veglio, fenso, ardo, piange” —PETRARCH
Think, weep, love, O watch
This casket that no keys unlatch
And may your eyes once locked in her
Gently release their prisoner.
Watch, love, weep, O think
Till it is thought not tears you drink
And thought can keep all pain apart
From her dissolved and open heart.
Love, watch, think, O weep
For her no love nor watch could keep
And may your tears be the release
Of
what kept you not her from peace.
Weep, think, watch, O love
Her who lies here and cannot move
And may your love rest lightly on
Her quiet consummation.
II
Only the purest voices,
The formal, the most disciplined,
Those that spring fully armed
From the dark caverns of the mind
Can stand beside her name,
Bright crystal, not bright flame.
And when those inward rivers rise
And flood your outward-looking eyes,
Wring the essential oils from pain:
Go back to Mozart once again,
Play Beethoven’s great Emperor,
Play Monteverdi, Bach for her.
Hear trumpet Milton and the flutes of Marvell:
Triumph not grief is what they have to tell.
The mastery that comes from discipline,
The joy that springs from form
(Where fumbling and facility are sin)
This was her element, her power, her charm—
On luminous and stern foundations
Built her detached, creative meditations.
Now fling the arches high and far from grief,
The light-swung bridges of your work and days.
Live now with knowledge, with compassion, and with praise.
Wherever spirit triumphs is her faith designed,
“By this great light upon our mind.”
III
Now you blood-richness, brilliance of nerve,
Spring of the spirit, you all-human wonder,
Break out of all the houses and unlock the doors!
You who can turn to ash the body’s pain,
Now burn grief too, now turn all grief to praise!
The point of intersection of all time and space
Where the huge face of death meets the small human face,
Where all is lost and all forever found,
Where all is loosed and all is bound,
Where all is stricken and all healed,
Where all is opened and all sealed,
Where all is unity, all separation,
Pure metaphysics, pure sensation,
Where love is nowhere and is everywhere
As light as ash, as light as blessed air,
Gift to the living from the palm of dust,
Fill us with your tremendous gust!
Leap from the green gloom of the summer trees,
Leap from the grasses and the glittering seas,
