Selected Poems of May Sarton

May Sarton, Serena Sue Hilsinger, Lois Brynes, Serena Sue Hilsinger, Lois Brynes

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781497689503
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

The comprehensive collection detailing the career of a twentieth-century master
In her prolific six-decade career, May Sarton was as at home crafting a novel as she was writing a memoir. However, it was in poetry that Sarton's feelings were laid bare. She was a writer of immense creativity and strength, and created a back catalog of poetry that could rival those of any of her contemporaries.
 
In Selected Poems of May Sarton, a collection from her first forty years of writing, many of the author's classic themes are on display: There are her meditations on solitude, featuring the breathtaking "Gestalt at Sixty"; there is her beautifully written tribute to literature in "My Sisters, O My Sisters"; and there is a rumination on affairs of the heart in an excerpt from the sonnet collection "A Divorce of Lovers."
 
Sarton was a true literary force, with the ability to speak to readers of all genders, persuasions, and ages, and Selected Poems of May Sarton demonstrates that power perfectly.

VI

Invocations and Mythologies

I tell you the gods are still alive

And they are not consoling.

“At Delphi”

I turn your face around! It is my face.

That frozen rage is what I must explore—

O secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place!

This is the gift I thank Medusa for.

“The Muse as Medusa”

The Approach—Calcutta

1

Landing

At four o’clock in the morning,

No man’s hour,

I felt only dread.

Muslims drove a herd

Of gaunt cows

To the slaughter,

While the Hindus slept,

A shrouded multitude,

On the streets.

The whole city

Appeared to be

An improvised morgue.

Even a beggar’s withered hand

Stretched out, inert,

As if already dead.

2

Here the gods themselves

Are too thick, too many,

Turn themselves into snakes,

Fish, or even boars,

And into sinuous lovers

Twined,

Erotic and restless,

In the coils of the eternal dance

Hot winds blew me

Hither and thither;

Barren,

Clouded by ignorance,

I peered out

At an impenetrable world:

People, animals,

Earth, gods,

Who none of them smiled.

Notes from India

The letters ask:

You describe so much,

But how do you feel?

What is happening to you?

What I see is happening to me.

1. At Bhubaneswar

The ragged, rough, continental spaces

Where people never stop walking,

Alone or in long lines,

Over the dirt roads

Under hot, windy skies—

Dark figures walking

With the air of pilgrims

In saris faded

Purple, soft red, dark blue;

Clerks in white dhoties

Carrying black umbrellas,

Barefoot, erect;

Old men in dusty turbans

Naked to the waist;

Women carrying jugs on their heads;

Children in bright yellow and pink;

And, against the horizon,

Four carts and their bullocks

Walking, walking.

It has no beginning. It never ends.

Hunching themselves toward the sky,

Lifting the earth with them,

These temples seem to be waiting

For something that happened

Nine centuries ago.

Inside, the rough phallus stands erect;

Outside, the sculptured lovers embrace,

While black kites

Float on the sullen air,

And the world stands still,

An everlasting noon.

The fresh watercolor

Green of rice,

A flight of emerald parakeets,

The kingfisher’s radiant blue—

Among the dead colors,

The cracked dry fields,

They meet the eye

As if earth burst

Like a pomegranate

To show its brilliance,

Fecundity of light.

The woman in a red sari,

Standing, thin presence

Among desiccated fields,

To watch us pass,

Looks as if she alone

Supported the whole sky.

In the temple pond

A young man prays

With folded hands,

His bronze chest bare

As he stands up to his waist

In the filthy, promiscuous,

Healing water.

Old women gossip under the banyan tree

While a Brahmin

Circumnavigates

The whitewashed temple

Chanting the morning prayer.

Little girls,

Damp hair stuck to their foreheads,

Dress in clean dresses—

The pool is troubled

Again and again

By the dark bodies

That go down through the scum

And return to the morning,

Smiling the smile of the newly washed.

In the distance a dove

Repeats itself.

I had been the woman

With a camera eye

Who notices everything

And is always watched,

The stranger on whom

No one smiled.

Then I slipped,

Fell headlong

In the red dust,

And at once the rickshaw boy

Is there at my side.

Thin expert hands

Feel hard for a break,

Then wipe the blood off

With a filthy cloth.

Worth a scraped knee

To land on this earth at last,

To be helped alive,

To be, in fact,

Touched!

The unsmiling people

Throng around me,

Smiling their pleasure.

Yes, I have landed.

Yes, I am alive.

2. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Publisher’s Note
• Introduction
• I The Composed Imagination
• II Love
• III Solitude
• IV Nature
• V In a Dirty Time
• VI Invocations and Mythologies
• VII The Action of Therapy
• Index to First Lines
• A Biography of May Sarton
• Copyright Page