SOURCE: DeShazer, Mary K. “‘Toward Durable Fire’: the Solitary Muse of May Sarton.” In That Great Sanity: Critical Essays on May Sarton, edited by Susan Swartzlander and Marilyn R. Mumford, pp. 119-50. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, DeShazer analyzes Sarton's complex treatment of “crucial relationship between the woman poet and her muse” as evidenced in the poems of A Durable Fire.]

“We have to make myths of our lives,” May Sarton says in Plant Dreaming Deep. “It is the only way to live them without despair.”¹ Of the many twentieth-century American women poets who are mythmakers, Sarton speaks most urgently and often about what it means to be a woman and a writer and about the female muse as a primary source of poetic inspiration. In the fourth “Autumn Sonnet” from A Durable Fire, she describes the crucial relationship between the woman poet and her muse.

I never thought that it could be, not once,
The Muse appearing in warm human guise,
She the mad creature of unhappy chance
Who looked at me with cold Medusa eyes,
Giver of anguish and so little good.
For how could I have dreamed that you would come
To help me tame the wildness in my blood,
To bring the struggling poet safely home?(2)

As “sister of the mirage and echo,” Sarton's muse parallels, in some respects, the quasi-erotic, mystical inspirer invoked by Robert Graves, her “whom I desired above all things to know.”³ Furthermore, in her “warm human guise,” Sarton's source of inspiration represents a female variation on contemporary poet Gary Snyder's theme of the muse as the “clearest mirror,” the “human lover.”⁴ But for Sarton the muse is also a demonic shadow, a crucial Medusa-self against whom the poet struggles and yet through whom she ultimately transforms the “wildness in my blood” into vital creative energy. In the words of Hilary Stevens, Sarton's poet-protagonist and alter ego in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, “the muse destroys as well as gives life, does not nourish, pierces, forces one to discard, renew, be born again. Joy and agony are pivoted in her presence.”⁵

To understand Sarton's theory of the muse, we must examine her view of female creativity, which centers on the antithesis between artist and woman. “I was broken in two / By sheer definition,” she exclaims in “Birthday on the Acropolis,” and though she is reacting here to the “pitiless clarity” of the stark Greek light and landscape, the statement describes as well her conflict in attempting to reconcile her femininity with her art.⁶ Like writers from Emily Dickinson to Virginia Woolf to Adrienne Rich, Sarton struggles to overcome psychic fragmentation, a feeling of self versus self. For Sarton, this quest to name and claim her female creative identity is complicated by an acceptance of the patriarchal definition of woman as Other—as beloved rather than lover, object rather than subject; in short, as inherently “other than” active creator. She aligns herself with a perspective both Jungian and ahistorical in assuming an archetypal feminine principle innately separate from an active masculine principle. This assumption has enormous implications for her poetics, which posits an inevitable dichotomy between the feminine and the artistic sensibilities. “The woman who needs to create works of art,” Hilary Stevens asserts, “is born with a kind of psychic tension in her which drives her unmercifully to find a way to balance, to make herself whole. Every human being has this need: in the artist it is mandatory. Unable to fulfill it, he goes mad. But when the artist is a woman, she fulfills it at the expense of herself as a woman.”⁷

“At the expense of herself as a woman”—this statement recalls Robert Southey's famous pronouncement to Charlotte Brontë in 1837: “literature is not the business of a woman's life, and it cannot be.”⁸ For May Sarton, Southey's assertion contains a modicum of truth. “After all, admit it,” Mrs. Stevens says to Jenny Hare, her youthful interviewer and a budding writer, “a woman is meant to create children, not works of art. … It's the natural order of things that [a man] constructs objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant.”⁹ Sarton's argument hinges on an acceptance of traditional definitions of masculine as active, objective, dynamic, and of feminine as passive, subjective, static. Any woman who writes seriously, according to this paradigm, assumes a masculine role. “I settled for being a woman,” Hilary's mother-in-law tells her. “I wonder whether you can.”¹⁰ Like Aphra Behn, who spoke of “my masculine part, the poet in me,” Sarton suggests that the aggressive, male side of the female self, the Jungian animus, creates literary works.¹¹ Yet Sarton neither claims nor desires to “write like a man”; as Peter Selversen, Hilary's other interviewer, says of her work, “the style is masculine; the content is feminine.”¹² Sarton is aware of the difficulties the woman writer confronts in attempting to reconcile her gender and her creativity. How, then, does she incorporate her view of the creative enterprise as a masculine phenomenon into her definition and perception of herself as a woman writer?

For one thing, she views the woman writer's aberrance not as a liability but as an asset, a source of unique creative power. In this respect she takes issue with Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who suggest that, in the nineteenth century, at least, the woman who writes typically “experiences her gender as a painful obstacle or even a debilitating inadequacy.”¹³ According to Sarton's schema, in contrast, the woman writer's aberrance serves as a constructive rather than a destructive force, for it catapults her not toward neurosis but toward health. Anxiety is especially acute in the creative woman, Sarton acknowledges, as are frustration, fragmentation, rage; but these feelings of being “rent in two … most of the time,” as Jenny describes herself in Mrs. Stevens, are precisely the raw material from which female art is sculpted, the female self validated.¹⁴ In a sense, therefore, Sarton agrees with Southey: literature is not a woman's business if the woman in question expects or wishes to assume traditional female roles as well as the nontraditional guise of artist. If the woman writer accepts and indeed relishes her incongruity, however, if she celebrates her aberrance as a source of artistic nourishment, literature becomes life's only business. “For the aberrant woman,” Mrs. Stevens explains, “art is health, the only health! It is … the constant attempt to rejoin something broken off or lost, to make whole again. It is always integrating.”¹⁵

Once her aberrance is acknowledged as a given, the woman writer can set about the process of self-discovery that Sarton believes lies at the root of meaningful art, especially of poetry. Although she has worked for fifty years in three genres—in addition to fifteen volumes of poetry, she has published twenty novels and seven nonfiction works—Sarton focuses her theory of female creativity on poetry and the process of attaining poetic autonomy. “Poetry and novels are absolutely different,” she asserts in World of Light, a film about her life and work. Whereas a novel represents a dialogue with others, poetry focuses on the inner world: “you write poetry for yourself and God.”¹⁶ In Journal of a Solitude she muses further on this subject: “Why is it that poetry always seems to me so much more of a true work of the soul than prose? I never feel elated after writing a piece of prose, though I have written good things on concentrated will. … Perhaps it is that prose is earned and poetry given.”¹⁷ Poetry, then, is a gift; the poet an instrument. One elects to be a novelist but is “chosen” to be a poet: “you have to be willing … to give something terribly intimate and secret of yourself to the world—and not care.”¹⁸

As the crucial source that inspires the poet, Sarton's muse “throws the artist back upon herself,” thereby facilitating this essential psychic exchange. “When the Muse comes,” Hilary explains, “the dialogue begins. … The Muse opens up the dialogue with oneself and goes her way.”¹⁹ “The Muse is always a question,” she continues. “That's what sets up the dialogue … not with the Muse, but with oneself.”²⁰ In some respects, Sarton's muse resembles the classic, passive, inspirational source of the male poet, the traditional female lover: she is mysterious, she cannot be pinned down, she “goes her way.” But, as a shadow to the woman poet, she also represents a vital, active aspect of the poetic process, a potent and demonic force against whom the poet is constantly pitted. “Think of a mixture of properties in a chemical test tube,” Hilary says to Jenny and Peter; “sometimes when two elements are mixed, they boil; there is tumult; heat is disengaged. So in the presence of the Muse, the sources of poetry boil; the faculty of language itself ferments.”²¹ Like Plato, Sarton believes that creative energy is often a product of irrationality, “frenzy,” and that the primary source of this tumult is the “honeyed muse.”

Whether she manifests herself as a serene visitant or a tempestuous “precipitating presence,” the muse for Sarton is irrevocably and quintessentially female; there neither is nor can be, she asserts, a male muse. “What seems to me valid and interesting,” Peter tells Jenny before they meet Hilary Stevens,

“is the question posited at such huge length by Robert Graves in The White Goddess—who and what is the Muse? Here we have a poet who has gone on writing poems long after the Muse, at least in a personal incarnation, has become irrelevant. What sustains the intensity? Is there a White God?” he asked, and immediately felt how funny it sounded. They both laughed.

“Of course not!”²²

Later, when Peter toasts the muse, “whoever she or he may be,” Hilary Stevens protests “‘Whom I desired above all things to know. Sister of the mirage and echo!’ … the Muse, young man, is she!”²³ For Sarton, this female muse is erotic, demonic, and maternal. In her guise as human lover, feminine inspiration incarnate, Sarton's muse resembles alternately Plato's Diotima, Petrarch's Laura, and Dante's Beatrice; she evokes either passionate love—Plato's “frenzy”—or a strong sense of spiritual connectedness or both. Yet the extreme tension that Sarton considers essential to the exchange between poet and muse often suggests not a meeting of lovers but a collision of wild, animal-like forces: “I am the cage where poetry / Paces and roars.”²⁴ These two extremes—the muse as lover and the muse as demon—merge finally in the image of the mother, Sarton's ultimate metaphor for poetic inspiration. “My mother still remains the great devouring enigma,” Hilary Stevens admits, “the Muse, you see. …”²⁵

This concept of the muse as mother suggests the complex struggle for female identity that the woman writer experiences: how to bring into her scope the Other, whether lover or demonic shadow or mother, without destroying the self. As psychologists and anthropologists from Sigmund Freud to Dorothy Dinnerstein have pointed out, human awe of and ambivalence toward the mother spring from her dual nature: as nurturer of life, she also holds the power of negation, destruction, and death. In the woman this ambivalence may be especially acute, since the biological mother is a powerful same-sex role model whom the daughter must simultaneously reject and emulate.²⁶ If the muse is ultimately the mother, as Sarton claims, she represents, for the woman poet, a source not only of love and nurture but also of anger and ambivalence. From the tension engendered by these conflicting emotions, Sarton concludes, springs impassioned poetry.

Although the female muse is the most crucial ingredient in the “witch's brew” that Sarton as a poet boils, a second element is also very important: solitude. “I have become enamored of solitude … my last great love,” she admits in the film World of Light, and indeed silence and isolation provide her with a major source of artistic nourishment. As the condition that breeds art, solitude is especially important to the woman poet, who frequently has had little access to a “room of her own.” “Solitude itself is a way of waiting for the inaudible and the invisible to make itself felt,” Sarton explains. “And that is why solitude is never static and never hopeless.”²⁷ Neither is it always easy, however. “The value of solitude—one of its values—is, of course, that there is … nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.”²⁸ Such attacks from within, she insists, force the woman artist to struggle with her art. For Sarton, then, female creativity is fertilized through a solitude shattered by visitations from the muse, who both intrudes upon and enhances this delicate but crucial way of living. The ideal result of such exchanges is a sense of balance, a reconciliation of selves.

Sarton's aesthetic views will be clarified and elaborated if we examine her depictions of the muse in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, a novel that might be considered poetic theory in the guise of fiction. The novel's protagonist, Hilary Stevens, serves as Sarton's double, mirror and mouthpiece for her creator. Like Sarton, she objects to her lack of serious critical attention, and she wishes to be considered foremost as a poet rather than a novelist. Hilary Stevens and May Sarton each live alone in a remote New England house to which each is strongly attached. Finally, both women discuss frankly their lesbianism, particularly as it affects their art.²⁹ As the poet's double, Hilary reveals Sarton's poetic theory, elaborates her perception of the female muse, and paints a lyrical portrait of several female incarnations of this muse.

Three distinct inspirational sources, or three aspects of a single muse, emerge in Mrs. Stevens: the detached lover, the demonic Other, and the all-pervading mother. Hilary Stevens must come to terms with all three forces during her interview with Peter and Jenny. The first incarnation of the muse that she recalls is the lover, distant and remote. Surfacing initially in Hilary's rememberings is her former governess, Phillippa Munn, the impetus behind the young poet's sexual and artistic awakening, her initial “instrument of revelation.” Spurned by Phillippa, who views her as child and student, the youthful Hilary turns to poetry to express her “multiplicity of sensation.”

Everything could now be said—this was the intoxicating discovery Hilary made. She could go the limit with her feeling; she could come to terms with it by analyzing it through the written word.³⁰

From this response to Phillippa, Hilary produces her first poetry, “a series of crude, passionate love poems” whose intensity shocks the governess and frightens their creator. Recalling Phillippa, the adult Hilary recognizes the value of this adolescent epiphany.

The sign of the Muse, she thought: impossible, haunting, she who makes the whole world reverberate. Odd that I recognized her at fifteen! And she felt some remote tenderness for that quaking, passionate being whose only outlet had been poetry—, bad poetry, at that!—But who had learned then to poise the tensions, to solve the equation through art.³¹

A much later manifestation of the lover-muse, Willa MacPherson, is another force behind Hilary's ongoing efforts to “poise the tensions, to solve the equation through art.” After years of intellectual exchange, Hilary becomes emotionally involved with Willa almost by accident: she brings her a recording of the Brandenburg Concerti and learns from Willa's violent response of her former liaison with a well-known musician. Hilary's awareness of Willa's unrequited passion arouses her own, and she unleashes a torrent of new poems that she presents to Willa, who accepts them with a detachment reminiscent of the attitude that medieval troubadours and Renaissance sonneteers attributed to their ladies.

Willa listened. She accepted the poems as the true Muse does with detached, imaginative grace; she brought to bear her critical intelligence, illuminated by something like love, the inwardness, the transparency which had been opened in spite of herself. … Above all, she succeeded in making Hilary accept that the poem itself was the reality, accept, at least at first, that together, for some mysterious reason, they made possible the act of creation. It was intimacy of a strange kind.³²

Despite her detachment, Willa differs from the male poet's courtly muse in her willingness to take Hilary's art seriously, to help the poet define and refine the power of the poetic word. She is distant, that is, but not disdainful. This relationship ends painfully, yet the elderly poet acknowledges Willa as a key inspirational force. “After all, the poems existed. That strange marriage of two minds, from which they had flowed, still lived there on the page.”³³

The passion that Hilary Stevens unleashes at times toward both Phillippa and Willa suggests a second manifestation of the muse as a demonic Medusa-self, violent yet essential to the tension that produces poetry at “white heat.” “Women are afraid of their demon, want to control it, make it sensible like themselves,” Hilary asserts; indeed, much of her artistic struggle hinges upon the recognition that one's demons must be confronted instead of denied.³⁴ Hilary's most incorrigible demons are “they,” those “enemy” voices that accompany old age with its attendant forgetfulness, its doubts as to one's creative capacities. “Who were they exactly?” Mrs. Stevens asks herself. “Old fool, they are your own demons, … the never-conquered demons with whom you carry on the struggle for survival against laziness, depression, guilt, and fatigue.”³⁵ This effort is exhausting at times, the poet admits, but it can also be energizing, particularly when “they” become “she,” a demonic lover-muse against whom the poet is pitted and through whom she is mirrored and defined.

For Hilary, this muse appears forcefully in Dorothea, a sociologist with whom she lived during middle age. Unlike Willa, who accepted poems as a goddess might receive supplicants, Dorothea and Hilary interact as equal forces; hence their exchanges are charged with a “concentrated violence.” Through Dorothea, Hilary is “once more in the presence of the Muse, the crucial one, the Medusa who had made her understand that if you turn Medusa's face around, it is your own face. It is yourself who must be conquered.”³⁶ As a source of renewed vitality, Dorothea forces Hilary to confront “the enemy,” herself, with a vengeance at once “a strange sort of love.”

But whatever it was, the poems began to pour out. Hilary walking down Fifth Avenue on the way to her job, would be pursued by poems, lines running through her head, lines of dialogue. Day and night, it seemed, she was struggling like a little bull against the wall, and the wall was Dorothea. Well, she thought, I have met my match.³⁷

As Hilary's “match,” a powerful Other who is also a part of the self, Dorothea evokes an ambivalence that emerges finally as a “devastating, destructive rage.” This hostility kills any hope of dialogue between poet and muse, as the two engage in a furious battle of wills. At last, Hilary realizes that “the creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the ‘creative’ is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.”³⁸ Mystic versus nonmystic, artist versus social scientist, Other versus self—despite their apparent differences, Hilary and Dorothea mirror each other; each sees in the other a self whom she feels driven to destroy. “I was the enemy, the anarchic, earth-shaking power,”³⁹ Hilary can admit years later. Broken into irrevocable halves, Hilary and Dorothea separate so that each may reconstruct herself. But Hilary learns a valuable lesson through her shadow: “It would have been better … to let the furies out instead of trying to contain them. I got split up, and those poems were the means of trying to knit myself together again.”⁴⁰ With poets such as Louise Bogan and Muriel Rukeyser, Sarton acknowledges the importance of controlling her furies in order to keep them from controlling her. “She of the disciplined mind had had to come to terms with the anarchic Aphrodite buried so deep in herself,” Hilary Stevens declares. Yet both she and Dorothea gain much from their mutual agony. “We had turned the Medusa face around and seen our selves. The long solitude ahead would be the richer for it.”⁴¹

As a final act of self-discovery, Hilary Stevens confronts the muse as mother—not only the literal, biological mother but also the Great Goddess in her fierce duality: angry as well as loving, life denying and life affirming. The interaction of maternal muse and female poet, Mrs. Stevens claims, “is what is meant by fertilization.”⁴² Early in the novel, Hilary acknowledges both awe and ambivalence toward her mother, whom she remembers in two ways: as a tired woman sitting at a desk, “overwhelmed by what she had failed to accomplish,” and as a rare intelligence who “flourished in social situations, loved good conversation with a passion, enjoyed pitting her mind and her personality against those of her peers.”⁴³ Yet like many children sent away to boarding school or summer camp, the young Hilary feels painfully rejected by her mother, to whom she is never totally reconciled.

Despite this resentment, it is her mother with whom Hilary holds her most crucial dialogue. In recalling her mother's death, the poet recognizes in her a compelling force that the daughter seeking artistic and personal validation must confront. “Yes, let us end this dialogue with the beginning,” she says to Peter and Jenny. “I have sometimes imagined that my last book might be about my mother; it is time to die when one has come to terms with everything. My mother still remains the great devouring enigma … the Muse, you see.”⁴⁴ If reconciliation between mother and daughter is impossible, Sarton suggests, the poet must come to terms with the maternal principle in and through her art. In this sense, therefore, the mother functions as a muse to the poet-daughter, as “she whom I desired above all things to know.”

Paralleling and complementing Sarton's theory of female creativity in Mrs. Stevens is her poetry itself—more than half a century's worth, written from 1930 to the present. “We are whole or have intimations of what it means to be whole when the entire being—spirit, mind, nerves, flesh, the body itself—are concentrated toward a single end. I feel it when I am writing a poem,” she claims in Journal of a Solitude. “Art is always integrating. … I have written every poem … to find out what I think, to know where I stand.”⁴⁵ The scope and nature of the poetic process, particularly that of the woman writer, provide the theme of “My Sisters, O My Sisters,” an early poem in which Sarton explores the link between female writing and female power. In the first section, the poet looks back through her literary foremothers and affirms the difficulties the woman artist faces in her movement from silence to speech.

Dorothy Wordsworth, dying, did not want to read,
“I am too busy with my own feelings,” she said.
And all women who have wanted to break out
Of the prison of consciousness to sing or shout
Are strange monsters who renounce the treasure
Of their silence for a curious devouring pleasure.
Dickinson, Rossetti, Sappho—they all know it,
Something is lost, strained, unforgiven in the poet.

Sarton argues that women writers are a breed apart, “strange monsters” who must set aside traditional female passivity to uncover the “curious devouring pleasure” of creativity. Such “sacrifices” are often problematical, the poet admits, and she offers a catalog of “aberrant” women writers to support her argument: George Sand, who “loved too much”; Madame de Stael, “too powerful for men”; Madame de Sévigné, “too sensitive.” Yet only through the self-imposed renunciation of traditional roles, she suggests, have authentic female voices emerged.

The contemporary woman writer, Sarton continues, has much to learn from her forebears' attempts to break out of the prison of silence. In order to become “more simply human,” she must come

… to the deep place where poet becomes woman,
Where nothing has to be renounced or given over
In the pure light that shines out from the lover,
In the pure light that brings forth fruit and flower
And that great sanity, that sun, the feminine power.

Sarton links herself to women poets from Emily Dickinson to H. D. in appropriating as a metaphor for “feminine power” the traditional symbol of masculine energy and potency, the sun. As writing women, the poet suggests, she and her peers must find that “deep place” from which to celebrate the “pure light” of creativity.

Sarton defines “that great sanity … the feminine power” as a revaluation of those qualities typically associated with woman: fecundity, nurture, and love. These “riches,” which have heretofore sustained men and children, “these great powers / Which are ours alone,” must now be used by women to fertilize one another, to stimulate their own creativity. As models of the precarious balance for which women must now strive, she offers two biblical foremothers with equally valuable but very different heritages: Eve and Mary. The reconciliation of passion and wisdom that these two women represent is important to Sarton's paradigm, since she believes that women, especially artists, must be governed by both attributes. Like H.D. in Trilogy, Sarton rejects misogynistic notions denouncing Eve as evil incarnate and offering as the sole model Mary, a symbol of feminine wisdom yet also of feminine purity and passivity. Instead, she re-visions and celebrates both women as active female forces.

To be Eve, the giver of knowledge, the lover;
To be Mary, the shield, the healer and the mother.
The balance is eternal whatever we may wish.

The woman poet's complex task, the poet concludes, is to affirm both branches of this full-bodied tree.

Yet Sarton acknowledges the difficulties inherent in such a quest. “Where rejoin the source / The fertile feminine goddess, double river?” In the final section she offers female creativity, woman's solitary art, as a means to “re-join the source” and thus attain balance and clarity of vision. Taking to task herself and other women who have “asked so little of ourselves and men / And let the Furies have their way,” the poet calls upon women to claim the “holy fountain” of creative imagination, transforming it into a wellspring of feminine song. Only by appropriating the “masculine and violent joy of pure creation,” the poet suggests, can women “come home to the earth,” giving birth to themselves as artists. “That great sanity, that sun, the feminine power” will become a reality, Sarton concludes, when women “match men's greatness” with their own art.⁴⁶

Other Sarton poems also describe the woman poet's efforts to “re-join the source,” to assert a vital female voice. This struggle provides the underlying dialectic of “Poets and the Rain,” which addresses the problem of poetic stasis and subsequent rejuvenation. In the first stanza, the poet-persona is debilitated by the rain, which reflects her own inertia and despair; she speaks not as an active creator but as a passive receptacle for the words of others. “I will lie here alone and live your griefs,” she declares. “I will receive you, passive and devout.” Yet, as she offers such disclaimers, the poet's creativity stirs, faint but intelligible. Plagued by “strange tides” in her head, she distinguishes three voices, each of which offers a different vision of life and art.

The first singer, an old man, “looks out and taunts the world, sick of mankind,” his voice “shriller than all the rest.” In an interesting reversal of a stereotype, Sarton associates shrillness not with a hysterical female voice but with a male cry of pessimism and derision. Although part of her sympathizes with this doomsday prophet, she ultimately rejects the model that he offers. She will “dream a hunting song to make the old hawk scream,” but she will not adopt such a voice herself. Contrasted to this male voice are two female speakers whose visions, when combined, posit for the poet a more balanced and optimistic stance. The first woman represents the traditional female voice, that of nurturer, comforter, inspirer.

Here is the woman, frustrate and most pure,
Who builds a nest of blessings and there sits
Singing the lighted tree and the dark stone
(Many times to this woman I have come),
Who bids us meditate and use our wits
And we shall, with the help of love, endure—

Comforted by the love that this woman's song exudes, the poet herself is inspired to become a voice of feminine wisdom and maternal love. This choice, however, is not enough for the creative woman: the singer is “frustrate”; her purity and nest building are passive postures. Despite her connection to traditional female arts, or perhaps because of it, this woman's song is too simple and static a model for the poet.

The speaker is most moved by the “blurred” yet potent voice of a “great girl, the violent and strong,”

Who walks accompanied by dreams and visions,
Speaks with the blurred voice of a giant sleeping
And wakes to hear the foreign children weeping
And sees the crystal crack, the fierce divisions,
Asking deep questions in her difficult song.(47)

This description recalls Denise Levertov's celebration in “In Mind” of a “turbulent moon-ridden girl … who knows strange songs,” or Louise Bogan's “The Dream,” in which a “strong creature … another woman” leaps and shouts until her passive counterpart is prodded into life-saving speech and action.⁴⁸ In Sarton's poem, the great girl's “deep questions” and “difficult song,” her fierce commitment to her art and her beliefs, offer the questing poet her most inspirational model. Although she realizes the difficulties of such a vision, the persona determines that her voice, like the girl's, must emerge from an emotional and intellectual complex, a “labyrinth of mind.”

A sudden sweep of raindrops from the cloud,
I stand, rapt with delight, though deaf and blind,
And speak my poem now, leaves of a tree
Whose roots are hidden deep in mystery.(49)

In rejecting stasis for dynamic song, the poet celebrates the complexity of her own imagination, its ability both to merge with nature and to transform it. Significantly, however, the speaker's celebration is not without its price, nor is her choice without ambivalence, for she is rendered deaf and blind in the wake of her song. She is able to sing, but she must acknowledge her impediments even as she asserts her newly found voice.

The special danger inherent in the woman poet's effort to “speak aloud,” to re-vision as her own the “masculine and violent joy of pure creation,” is also the subject of “Journey toward Poetry.” The poet's structuring of her imaginative experience, Sarton suggests, is analogous to a dangerous journey across foreign yet somehow familiar terrain, a haunting interior picaresque that ultimately produces the ideal word or image or perspective for the chary traveler. For Sarton, such a psychic voyage usually begins in chaos, concentrated violence.

First that beautiful mad exploration
Through a multiple legend of landscape
When all roads open and then close again
Behind a car that rushes toward escape,
The mind shot out across foreign borders
To visionary and abrupt disorders.

An array of intensely surrealistic images accompanies such “mad exploration”: hills winding and unwinding on a spool; rivers running away from their beds; a geranium bursting open to reveal a “huge blood-red cathedral”; “marble graveyards” falling into the sea. One is reminded of Yeats's “blood-dimmed tide”: “the center cannot hold,” Sarton implies, when the imagination runs unchecked.

Yet the center does hold. Once the poet's errant imagination is stayed, her inner landscapes soften, become pastoral. From disorder, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, emerges a violent order.

After the mad beautiful racing is done,
To be still, to be silent, to stand by a window
Where time not motion changes light to shadow,
Is to be present at the birth of creation.(50)

Reconstructing her universe from a position of silence and stasis, the poet transforms mundane objects—“the field of wheat, the telephone pole”—into something altogether new. In Hilary Stevens's words, “intensity commands form.”⁵¹ “Journey toward Poetry” serves as Sarton's metaphoric depiction of the poetic process, fraught with danger for any poet but intensely so for the woman. Beginning in rage or anxiety, at “white heat,” the poet's “beautiful mad racing” ultimately gives way to that fruitful ripening of image and idea that informs “the birth of creation.”

Central to the creative process for Sarton is the female muse, perceived by the poet as “always a question … what sets up the dialogue” with oneself.⁵² As the pivotal force upon which poetry centers, the muse, like the protean poet, wears multiple masks. Sarton is especially vocal about the inspirational power of the muse as lover: “You learn a lot from the person you love. I'm talking about women mostly. That's the whole thing for me. Women have been the muse, and it's the more aggressive side of me which falls in love with women. I feel more able to write and more myself than I do at any other time.” During relationships with men, Sarton continues, she felt drained of creative energy. “With a woman, on the contrary, I felt very excited, wrote poems, you see. And that is the only way I can judge.”⁵³

In her poetry, this erotic manifestation of the muse appears sometimes as a human lover-visitant, sometimes as a goddess or mythological woman. One recurring figure is Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and sexuality, who also is linked to such ancient Eastern mother-goddesses as Ishtar, Isis, and Astarte.⁵⁴ Because the goddess's powers are both matriarchal and sexual, Sarton often envisions Aphrodite as a primordial figure of fecundity. Such a goddess is found in “These Images Remain,” an early sonnet sequence in which the poet confronts the sexual tension at the heart of the poet-muse relationship. As the epitome of female beauty and eroticism, Aphrodite inspires the poet to become free and fertile.

And you are here at last, and you are free
To stand like Aphrodite on her shell,
Wrapped in the wind, the net of nerves undone,
So piercingly alive and beautiful,
Her breasts are eyes. She opens in the sun
And sees herself reflected in the sand
When the great wave has left her naked there,
And looks at her own feet and her own hand
As on strange flowers and on her golden hair
As on some treasure given by the seas
To one who holds the earth between her knees.

Yet this “silent consummation” between poet and muse is as precarious as quicksand, Sarton suggests in the fifth sonnet; any union with Aphrodite must be transitory, fleeting. She images herself as a male sculptor whose creation grows “out of deprivation … / out of a self-denying rage,” inspired by intense longing and frustration. “He gladly yields for the sake of those lips,” Sarton says of the sculptor-poet, “That savage throat that opens the whole chest, / Tension so great between him and the stone, / It seems he carries vengeance in his wrist.” The poet can never possess the muse, Sarton realizes, but the effort to possess results in the sculptor's images, “great and severe.” From the encounter between poet and muse, from “difficult love,” comes a lasting art.⁵⁵

Though the poet is periodically estranged from her muse, such separation is rarely long-lived. “The Muse is never wholly absent,” Hilary Stevens explains to Peter and Jenny, discussing her own rejuvenation after writer's block. “One must at least glimpse the hem of her garment, as she vanishes into her radiant air.”⁵⁶ In “The Return of Aphrodite,” Sarton describes a re-encounter with the muse.

From deep she rises, poised upon her shell.
Oh guiltless Aphrodite so long absent!
The green waves part. There is no sound at all
As she advances, tranquil and transparent,
To lay on mortal flesh her sacred mantle.
The wave recedes—she is drawn back again
Into the ocean where light leaves a stain.(57)

Transparency is central to Sarton's muse as an extension of the self, the Medusa through whom one can gaze upon oneself. Unlike the poet's confrontation with Medusa, however, her exchange with Aphrodite is depicted in images of silence and tranquility, pure light rather than white heat. Sarton's imagery is also richly erotic: as the mortal poet receives the goddess's “sacred mantle,” the “green waves part,” receding at once after the sacred consummation and leaving in their wake a faint “stain” of light.

The erotic muse appears as devouring in “A Divorce of Lovers,” a sonnet sequence on the poet's efforts to restore her lapsed poetic powers after a devastating love affair. In World of Light, Sarton explains that these poems were written “in batches” during an extremely high fever; and her subsequent discussion of the muse as “a woman who focuses the world for me,” whether in a pleasant or a painful way, suggests a connection between the lover in the poems and the muse. The lovers here are imagined as “two warring halves … cut in two,” wounded perhaps beyond repair. In an effort to heal her wounds, the poet invokes the “surgeon,” Reason, doubting all the while that this “doctor” has the power to rejuvenate her poetic energies: “We shall see / How Reason operates on Poetry.” As the surgeon wields the scalpel, images of destruction dominate: “Old Fate” snapping the threads of life and love; a flower dying, cut at full bloom. As her wounds heal, however, the poet numbs to pain and feels, instead, the disorientation of a “blundering bird,” a “baffled wanderer” on a “lost journey … out of this wilderness.”

Eventually, the poet realizes that the loss of the lover can be endured; it is the loss of creativity that must be challenged. To “force Fate at a crucial pass,” she invokes solitude as a healing balm: “Where these words end, let solitude begin.”⁵⁸ Like Louise Bogan, Sarton recognizes that harsh words and cacophonous music must give way to an interim silence before the creative voice can be restored to its full resonance.⁵⁹ In Sonnet 17 she celebrates silence as a companion.

As thoughts like clouds traverse my human eyes,
Silence opens the world that I explore:
Mozartian gaiety, the lightest presence,
At last I welcome back my wandering soul
Into these regions of strange transcendence,
And find myself again, alive and whole.(60)

The re-integration of the self and the restoration of the poet's creative power are made possible, Sarton suggests, by a “turning back upon the self” that illuminates and indeed transforms both self and world.

Sarton's image of the muse as the beloved is especially prominent in the title sequence of Letters from Maine. The poet's “November Muse” is not the fierce, angry lover of her youth; rather, she gives “wisdom and laughter, also clarity.” Even when the muse is absent, the speaker declares in the third poem, “I am floated on her presence, / Her strong reality, swung out above / Everything else that happens.” But the erotic muse in these poems is also spiritual, an “Old Woman” who, according to a legend of the Nootka Indian tribe, is a “Primal Spirit, one with rock and wave.”

Old Woman I meet you deep inside myself.
There in the rootbed of fertility,
World without end, as the legend tells it,
Under the words you are my silence.

The impact of this inspirational source becomes poignantly clear when the muse rejects the poet. Without inspiration, Sarton explains, “nothing can be said.” Ultimately, however, the creative impulse perseveres, as the poet transforms painful experience into a lyrical and analytical assessment of the erotic muse's function.

When the muse appears after long absence
Everything stops except the poem. It rises
In an unbroken wave and topples to silence.
There is no way to make it happen by will.
No muse appears when invoked, dire need
                    Will not raise her pity.
She comes when she can,
She too, no doubt, rising from the sea
Like Aphrodite on her shell when it is time,
When the impersonal tide bears her to the shore
To play a difficult role she has not chosen,
To free a prisoner she has no reason to love.
What power is at work, then, what key
Opens the door into these mysteries?(61)

The muse for Sarton also appears as a demonic force, a fury with whom the poet must come to terms in order to maintain creative energy. “Every visitation of the Muse is disturbing,” Hilary Stevens declares, unsettling because it evokes such a conflicting array of responses: love and joy, guilt and rage. This ambivalence toward one's inspirational source is not new; women poets from Emily Dickinson to Emily Brontë to Louise Bogan have viewed their muse as a hostile force, sometimes male, sometimes female, frequently demonic. The poet, of course, is pitted against this muse in a fierce struggle for power. Sarton's demonic muse resembles Brontë's and Dickinson's in the tension it evokes, but, like Bogan and other modern women poets, Sarton envisions her muse as a female shadow rather than a male Other. Rebellious but potent, this muse stimulates the poet's creative energy but also arouses feelings of anger, shame, and ambivalence. “The deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting, and tormented self,” Hilary Stevens admits. “Women are afraid of their daemon,” she continues, “want to … make it sensible like themselves.”⁶² Sarton realizes, however, that one's demons cannot and should not be “made sensible.” Instead, they should be acknowledged and re-visioned as a source of vital energy, creative rage.

The muse as a fury out for vengeance and retribution appears frequently in poems on the demise of a relationship and the subsequent loss of creative energy. In the fourth sonnet of “A Divorce of Lovers,” for example, Sarton accuses her lover of “chasing out the furies and the plagues of passion” rather than attempting to come to terms with them.

My guess is that the weapon's name was Pride.
It is a word the Furies understand;
Their ghosts are gathering on every side,
And they will raise the hair upon your hand.(63)

In awe of the monsters who plague her, the poet nonetheless needs such “ghosts” if they can be re-visioned. When angels and furies “fly so near,” she explains, “they come to force Fate at a crucial pass.”⁶⁴ This forcing of Fate, in turn, opens up a crucial dialogue with the self that ultimately transforms the poet's violence into creative energy. “Have done, poor beast,” Sarton exhorts her fury. “I have come back into my world of no one … / And I am nourished here after the famine.”⁶⁵

In “The Furies,” the poet explores the difficulties in reconciling herself to her demonic aspects. Here Sarton proffers a central psychological and aesthetic question: “How then to recognize / The hard unseeing eyes, / Or woman tell from ghost?” The woman poet's furies are “almost” human, Sarton explains—“almost, and yet not quite.” The danger inherent in one's furies lies in their capacity to strip the poet of her energy and wits, to “wrap you in glamor cold, / Warm you with fairy gold, / Till you grow fond and lazy, / Witty, perverse, and crazy.” Only after coming to terms with the risks one takes as a creator, Sarton concludes, “can one drink [the Furies'] health … / And call the Furies kind.”⁶⁶

In this poem, Sarton looks ironically at the problems she faces in confronting her demons. Yet, despite her effort to distance through irony, her fear of the Furies is great. “Never look straight at one,” she warns the reader, “for then your self is gone.” At other times, however, she asserts the creative woman's need to confront these furious forces, admitting their power and thus claiming it as her own. Such is the theme of “A Storm of Angels.”

Anarchic anger came to beat us down,
Until from all that battering we went numb
Like ravaged trees after a hurricane.
But in its wake we saw fierce angels come—
Not gentle and not kind—who threshed the grain
With their harsh wings, winnowed from waste.

Despite their harshness, these angels are rejuvenating rather than debilitating, for they come “as messengers of a true power denied.” The angels “beat down” the poet, strip her of her pride, bring her agony, yet this energizing agony sets the poet free. It is a gift from the furies to their selected instrument: “Theirs is an act of grace, and it is given / To those in Hell who can imagine Heaven.”⁶⁷

Often Sarton replaces angels and furies with animals, demonic forces that must be re-visioned. In “Control,” for example, the poet argues against any attempt to deny the tiger within. In restraining such a beast, Sarton explains, one exercises a heady power at great expense, for destroying the tiger's vitality also negates an essential part of the self.

You may have complete control.
There will be no roar or growl.
But can you look into those eyes
Where the smothered fire lies?(68)

If the tiger's “fire” is “smothered,” Sarton concludes, the poet risks cooling the white heat that generates good poetry.

Yet Sarton is not always comfortable with the demonic part of the self. In “After the Tiger,” her ambivalence toward the monster within surfaces as she alternately affirms and laments this psychic conflict. When “the tiger, violence, takes the human throat,” the speaker first rejoices, “glad of the blood, glad of the lust,” because “that tiger strength—oh it is beautiful!” Much of the tiger's demonic beauty lies in its purity of form, its awesome presence. “It is all success,” she says of the tiger's strength. “It feels like a glorious creation.” In subsequent stanzas, however, Sarton's ambivalence toward the tiger's brute strength surfaces, as she wonders what should be done with this passionate animal. After all, such wild release—however euphoric—is ultimately unsettling. “Who was a tiger once” becomes then “weak and small, / And terribly unfit for all he has to do.” The poet wonders “who is a friend here, who an enemy,” for the wounds that the “ghostly tiger” inflicts “sometimes do not heal for centuries.” Peace after violence is possible, Sarton posits tentatively, but only if the “peacemaker” has the patience and courage to reconstruct bit by bit what the raging tiger has torn down.

After the tiger we become frail and human
The dust of ruins acrid in the throat.
Oh brothers, take it as an absolution
That we must work so slowly toward hope!(69)

This poem makes an interesting companion to Bogan's “The Sleeping Fury,” in which the “tiger” is a shrieking maenad who wreaks terror through the night. In both poems this fury, an aspect of the self, must “sleep off madness” after unleashed violence. Both furies are perceived as benevolent-malevolent forces: Sarton's tiger is “enemy” and “friend”; Bogan's fury is “my scourge, my sister.” But, while Bogan finds strength and sustenance through her encounter with the fury, Sarton remains shaken: “After the violence peace does not rise / Like a forgiving sun to wash all clean.” For Sarton, who claims to write from her aggressive, masculine side, the violent forces that clash in “After the Tiger” are depicted here as male: the tiger is a “god”; the poet in whom the tiger resides, “he”; the audience whom the poet addresses, “brothers.” Bogan's “scourge,” in contrast, is at once a “sister,” a crucial same-sex figure more comprehensible to the woman poet. Sarton here is overwhelmed by the masculine fury. She is “frail and human,” ambivalent toward the tiger's powers and unconvinced of her own. Bogan, on the other hand, concludes on a more confident note, having transformed her fury's destructive rage into creative energy: “Alone and strong in my peace, I look upon you in yours.”⁷⁰

When Sarton perceives her demonic counterpart as a female shadow rather than a male Other, however, she often experiences a creative impetus similar to that which Bogan wrests from her sleeping fury. In “The Godhead as Lynx,” for instance, the poet gleans nourishment from the beautiful yet cold mother-lynx.

Kyrie Eleison, O wild lynx!
Mysterious sad eyes, and yet so bright,
Wherein mind never grieves or thinks,
But absolute attention is alight—
Before that golden gaze, so deep and cold,
My human rage dissolves, my pride is broken.

Sarton often uses face-to-face confrontation to dramatize the dialogue between poet and demonic muse; here the speaker, though but a “child,” nonetheless challenges the lynx by meeting her “obsidian” eyes. Rather than fearing confrontation and dreading its aftermath, the speaker undertakes it on her own terms.

She goes on to envision the lynx as a “prehuman” maternal goddess into whose womb the poet-daughter is tempted to crawl.

I feel a longing for the lynx's bed,
To submerge self in that essential fur,
And sleep close to this ancient world of grace,
As if there could be healing next to her,
The mother-lynx in her prehuman place.
Yet that pure beauty does not know compassion—
O cruel god, Kyrie Eleison!

Like ancient goddesses, the lynx is linked to both creation and destruction. Despite her “essential fur,” her maternal comfort, she “does not know compassion”; and she is “cruel … / lightning to cut down the lamb, / A beauty that devours without qualm.” Beneficent and demonic, therefore, the lynx offers the poet both a model and a means of self-possession and self-affirmation. As “a cruel god who only says ‘I am,’” the lynx represents unharnessed male power in female flesh; thus, her splendor and unusual force awaken the poet's own strength. Through her encounter with the godhead as lynx, the poet becomes a “laboring self who groans and thinks.”⁷¹

The demonic muse whom Sarton most often invokes is Medusa, the mythological monster whose hair writhed with serpents, whose glance turned men to stone. Because she could be viewed only indirectly and because of the mystery and danger associated with her powers, she suggests the woman poet's struggle with herself for herself. In “The Muse as Medusa,” Sarton describes an encounter with this “fury” and her effort to re-vision the potent and dynamic relationship between poet and muse. In contrast to the speaker's ironic advice in “The Furies”—“never look straight at one, / For then your self is gone”—Sarton here meets Medusa as she has met the lynx: one on one, “straight in the cold eye, cold.” Despite her “nakedness” and vulnerability, the poet transforms the legendary monster from a debilitating force to a source of creative rejuvenation.

I came as naked as any little fish,
Prepared to be hooked, gutted, caught;
But I saw you, Medusa, made my wish,
And when I left you I was clothed in thought …

Medusa's stony gaze does not destroy; it transfigures, “clothing” the naked speaker in the warm protective garment of perception. “Forget the image,” Sarton exults, for this Medusa renews through her silent but vital presence: “Your silence is my ocean, / And even now it teems with life.”

Yet Medusa herself is not responsible for this teeming life; it continues in spite of, rather than because of, her presence. Medusa, after all, “chose / To abdicate by total lack of motion,” and abdicating is something the speaker refuses to do. Instead, Sarton creates a dynamic, fluid seascape of which this fury can become a part, her destructive rage used rather than denied. In re-visioning Medusa “in her own image,” the poet acknowledges a vital female creativity and affirms the demonic part of herself: “I turn your face around! It is my face.”⁷² This final statement echoes Hilary Stevens's response to Dorothea: “she was once more in the presence of the Muse, the crucial one, the Medusa who had made her understand that if you turn Medusa's face around, it is your own face.”⁷³ Sarton is eager to examine the causes of her pain, to heal herself, to speak out. In revising Medusa as a source of creative energy, she paradoxically affirms and challenges another of Hilary Stevens's assertions: “we are all monsters, if it comes to that, we women who have chosen to be something more and something less than women.”⁷⁴

The third aspect of the muse that Sarton explores in both Mrs. Stevens and her poetry is the mother as inspirational source. At times the mother appears as a potent demonic figure, as in “The Godhead as Lynx.” In several poems, however, Sarton celebrates female fecundity and maternity without demonic trappings, invoking as muse a beneficent mother figure who inspires the woman poet through her greater widsom. In an early poem, “She Shall Be Called Woman,” for example, the poet celebrates one of her most maligned yet potent foremothers, the biblical Eve, as a symbol of maternal fecundity and sexual and spiritual rejuvenation. Stripped of the demonic associations accorded her by patriarchal culture and religion, Sarton's Eve is re-visioned as an Ur-mother, created initially by God but recreated by herself, out of her own energy and will. Sarton's chronicle omits the Genesis 2 creation scene and instead describes Eve's first faint murmurs of self-identity, ironically coincidental with her initial sexual encounter. Although “she did not cry out / nor move. / She lay quite still,” Eve, like Lilith before her, is nonetheless frightened and angered.

She could not yet endure
this delicate savage
to lie upon her.
She could not yet endure
the blood to beat so there.
She could not cope
with the first ache
of fullness.

In a radical re-vision of the Genesis myth, Sarton has Eve, “disrupted at the center / and torn,” leave Eden and seek refuge in the maternal womb of the sea: “And she went into the sea / because her core ached / and there was no healing.”

As with the muse as Medusa, however, so with Eve: “not in denial, her peace.” Through her solitary journey into feminine consciousness, Eve learns not to deny her sexuality and creativity but to claim them as sources of power. She begins to derive pleasure and confidence from her physical self.

She was aware
down to extremity
of how herself was charged,
fiber electric,
a hand under her breast
could hear the dynamo.
.....Nothing ever was
as wonderful as this.

In exploring her own body, Eve “clothes herself” with a female garment of sexuality, fecundity, and power. “She would not ever be naked / again,” the poet insists. As “the core of life,” Eve casts off the vulnerability and powerlessness that Genesis 2 portrays as woman's lot. Instead, she gives birth “out of the infinite” to an autonomous entity: “‘I am the beginning, / the never-ending, / the perfect tree.’” To depict Eve's birthing of the female self Sarton uses menstruation as a metaphor.

There were seeds
within her
that burst at intervals
and for a little while
she would come back
to heaviness,
and then before a surging miracle
of blood,
relax,
and reidentify herself,
each time more closely
with the heart of life.(75)

As Eve the foremother reidentifies herself through her menstrual cycle, she connects “more closely / with the heart of life.” So, Sarton implies, must Eve's daughter, the woman poet, rejuvenate herself through her resurgent creativity.

The woman poet's need to become a mother to herself and her art can be seen in a poem about Sarton's own mother, Mabel Elwes Sarton. “An Observation” was, by the poet's own admission, very difficult to write. But a persistent image of her mother, at work in her garden with “a rough sensitivity,” finally metamorphosed into a poetic tribute.

True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother's hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world.(76)

As inheritor of her mother's healing powers, Sarton received a crucial “truth”: vulnerability must be accompanied by rigor, tenderness by toughness, else the plant, the delicate and valuable creation, is unlikely to grow. “You must remain vulnerable and tough,” Sarton explained during a reading of this poem, “or else you'll die of it.”⁷⁷ Vulnerability, growth, balance—the heritage that the mother-muse bequeaths the daughter-poet.

In one of her most provocative poems about female inspiration, “The Invocation to Kali,” Sarton depicts the muse as both demon and mother, confronting what Hilary Stevens calls “the full motherhood, the full monsterhood” of those who try to be “something more and something less than woman.”⁷⁸ By celebrating Kali as muse, Sarton affirms the close link that she perceives among demonic rage, maternal love, and female creativity. The poem opens with an epigraph from Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God, a description of “the Black Goddess Kali, the terrible one of many names, ‘difficult of approach,’ whose stomach is a void and so can never be filled, and whose womb is giving birth forever to all things.” As this passage suggests, many of Kali's traits parallel those that numerous cultures have assigned to “evil” goddesses. She is elusive, loath to be controlled by man; she is devouring and insatiable; and she is constantly and oppressively fertile, fecund despite man's efforts to contain her. Like many matriarchal goddesses, therefore, Kali stands for both creation and destruction, life and death, but is usually associated only with the negative pole of this duality. As an aspect of the woman's creative self, Kali is thus both inspiring and threatening. Her dual powers intrigue the poet, yet an identification with Kali evokes shame, anger, and fear—that peculiar blend of self-love and self-loathing of one both trapped and freed by her art.

In section 1, Sarton sets forth this poem's central issue—how best to cope with Kali's demands.

There are times when
I think only of killing
The voracious animal
Who is my perpetual shame,
The violent one
Whose raging demands
Break down peace and shelter
Like a peacock's scream.
There are times when
I think only of how to do away
With this brute power
That cannot be tamed.
I am the cage where poetry
Paces and roars. The beast
Is the god. How murder the god?
How live with the terrible god?

Aware of the capacity for creation that accompanies Kali's power, the poet is nonetheless ambivalent toward this demonic force, for she recognizes also its potential for debilitation and entrapment. What then to do with Kali? the poet wonders. Is she to be murdered or lived with?

Section 2 suggests the futility of any effort to murder the goddess.

The kingdom of Kali is within us deep.
The built-in destroyer, the savage goddess,
Wakes in the dark and takes away our sleep.
She moves through the blood to poison gentleness.
How then to set her free or come to terms
With the volcano itself, the fierce power
Erupting injuries, shrieking alarms?
Kali among her skulls must have her hour.(79)

Sarton's imagery of volcanic eruption recalls a comment by H. D. about her art: “A sort of rigor mortis drove me onward. No, my poetry was not dead but it was built on or around the crater of an extinct volcano. Not rigor mortis. No, No! The vines grow more abundantly on those volcanic slopes.”⁸⁰ Although Sarton's “volcanic slopes” are far from extinct, she shares H. D.'s certainty that the explosive potential of poetry gives it its vital, living force. If Kali is denied, Sarton suggests, she will continue her bloody reign, and the result will be what H. D. so passionately fears: “rigor mortis.” But if Kali is faced “open-eyed,” her explosive powers will be revealed for what they are: forces necessary if creativity is to flourish. For every act of creation, Sarton insists, is preceded by some kind of destruction.

Every creation is born out of the dark.
Every birth is bloody. Something gets torn.
Kali is there to do her sovereign work
Or else the living child will be stillborn.

In the next section of “The Invocation to Kali” Sarton expands the image of Kali as a metaphor for the societal violence of the twentieth century. “The Concentration Camps” is packed with gruesome images depicting the horrifying results of humanity's efforts to deny its furies, to pretend that violence does not exist. “Have we managed to fade them out like God?” she asks of the most tragic of Hitler's victims, children. In “having turned away” from the “stench of bones,” she continues, we have “tried to smother” fires that desperately need to burn, as vital reminders of what happens when violence is repressed and then unleashed. “What we have pushed aside and tried to bury, / Lives with a staggering thrust we cannot parry,” the poet asserts. All of us are guilty, Sarton's indictment implies; refusing to meet our demons is both a cultural and an individual sickness.

In Sarton's view, the only solution to this widespread ailment is “to reckon with Kali for better or worse,” to accept her violence as an essential purging force. Thus the poet turns finally to the goddess's sacred altar, offering an invocation to this “terrible one.”

Kali, be with us.
Violence, destruction, receive our homage.
Help us to bring darkness into the light,
To lift out the pain, the anger,
Where it can be seen for what it is—
The balance-wheel for our vulnerable, aching love.
Put the wild hunger where it belongs,
Within the act of creation,
Crude power that forges a balance
Between hate and love.
Help us to be the always hopeful
Gardeners of the spirit
Who know that without darkness
Nothing comes to birth
As without light
Nothing flowers.
Bear the roots in mind,
You, the dark one, Kali,
Awesome power.(81)

In “The Invocation to Kali,” Sarton explores the power of the demonic maternal muse, the woman poet's “great devouring enigma” and the destructive/creative force through whom she must “forge a balance / Between hate and love.” As Adrienne Rich has noted, motherhood is a highly charged metaphor for the woman writer, “the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.”⁸² The woman writer, both Sarton and Rich would argue, inevitably associates her poetic creativity with the female capacity for giving bloody birth. As we have seen, images of maternal power inform many of Sarton's tributes to the muse: the erotic Aphrodite “holds the earth between her knees,” taking it in as her lover and bearing it as her child; the cold Medusa “clothes” her poet-daughter in the comforting wrap of thought; even the demonic Kali fosters creation, however violent, “out of the dark.” For Sarton, the sexual, demonic, and maternal aspects of the muse are joint attributes of a single violent yet essential force.

The final poem of Halfway to Silence, “Of the Muse,” offers a powerful and moving assessment of Sarton's creative philosophy as it has developed over fifty years.

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.
Now I am older and wiser,
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.(83)

The transformative power of poetry, Sarton continues to claim, emerges from an intense encounter between the woman poet and her female muse, the symbolic source of poetic inspiration and sustenance.

Furthermore, this poem reveals Sarton's emphasis on the link between poetry and honesty, a concern of many contemporary feminist theorists and women poets. “We have been rewarded for lying,” Adrienne Rich declares, yet “the unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry comes from the same struggle.”⁸⁴ Rich's statement might well be Sarton's, so accurately does it describe the theory implicit in “Of the Muse.” Struggling to fulfill its desire for truth, the woman poet's “fecund and complex” unconscious, Sarton suggests along with Rich, is awakened to vital insights and potent speech through her dialogue with that muse who is at once the self. Once misunderstood, the muse is now recognized by the aging poet as a force analogous to light. “We do not thank the light,” Sarton explains, “but rejoice in what we see / Because of it.” What we see is the “crude” but honest power of poetry, its transformative potential. Through the female muse, “all things are made new.”⁸⁵

Notes

1. May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep (New York: Norton, 1973), 151.

2. May Sarton, “The Autumn Sonnets,” in Collected Poems, 1930-1973 (New York: Norton, 1974), 386.

3. Robert Graves, “In Dedication,” prologue to The White Goddess (1948; reprint ed., New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 5.

4. Gary Snyder, quoted in Adrienne Rich, “Poetry, Personality, and Wholeness: A Response to Galway Kinnell,” Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 7 (Fall 1972): 14.

5. May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (New York: Norton, 1965), 186.

6. May Sarton, “Birthday on the Acropolis,” in Collected Poems, 251-53.

7. Mrs. Stevens, 191.

8. Robert Southey, letter to Charlotte Brontë, March 1837, quoted in Winifred Gérin, Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 110.

9. Mrs. Stevens, 190.

10. Mrs. Stevens, 47.

11. Aphra Behn, quoted in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 66.

12. Mrs. Stevens, 127.

13. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, 49-50.

14. Mrs. Stevens, 77.

15. Mrs. Stevens, 190.

16. World of Light: A Portrait of May Sarton (Ishtar Films, 1979). In this essay, I use the title World of Light to identify the film and to distinguish it from Sarton's collection of biographical sketches, A World of Light.

17. May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude (New York: Norton, 1973), 40.

18. World of Light (Ishtar).

19. Mrs. Stevens, 181.

20. Mrs. Stevens, 185-86.

21. Mrs. Stevens, 154.

22. Mrs. Stevens, 83.

23. Mrs. Stevens, 147.

24. May Sarton, “The Invocation to Kali,” in Collected Poems, 316.

25. Mrs. Stevens, 193.

26. For a discussion of this mother-daughter link, see Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976).

27. Plant Dreaming Deep, 70.

28. Journal of a Solitude, 16.

29. See, for example, Dolores Shelley, “A Conversation with May Sarton,” Women and Literature 7 (Spring 1979): 33-41.

30. Mrs. Stevens, 107.

31. Mrs. Stevens, 108.

32. Mrs. Stevens, 141.

33. Mrs. Stevens, 146.

34. Mrs. Stevens, 92.

35. Mrs. Stevens, 16.

36. Mrs. Stevens, 161-62.

37. Mrs. Stevens, 164.

38. Mrs. Stevens, 169.

39. Mrs. Stevens, 169.

40. Mrs. Stevens, 171.

41. Mrs. Stevens, 170.

42. Mrs. Stevens, 181.

43. Mrs. Stevens, 64.

44. Mrs. Stevens, 192-93.

45. Journal of a Solitude, 12, 55.

46. May Sarton, “My Sisters, O My Sisters,” in Collected Poems, 74-77.

47. May Sarton, “Poets and the Rain,” in Collected Poems, 110.

48. Denise Levertov, “In Mind,” in Poems, 1960-1967 (New York: New Directions, 1967), 143; Louise Bogan, “The Dream,” in The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968 (New York: Ecco Press, 1977), 103.

49. May Sarton, “Poets and the Rain,” in Collected Poems, 111.

50. May Sarton, “Journey Toward Poetry,” in Collected Poems, 151.

51. Mrs. Stevens, 151.

52. Mrs. Stevens, 185.

53. Shelley, “Interview with Sarton,” 38-39.

54. For a discussion of Aphrodite's link to dual-faceted Eastern goddesses, see Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim (1955; reprint ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 80-81, 273-75.

55. Sarton, “These Images Remain,” in Collected Poems, 144-47.

56. Mrs. Stevens, 153.

57. May Sarton, “The Return of Aphrodite,” in Collected Poems, 367.

58. May Sarton, “A Divorce of Lovers,” in Collected Poems, 201-5.

59. See, for example, Bogan's “Poem in Prose,” “My Voice Not Being Proud,” and “Sub Contra,” all in Blue Estuaries, 72, 13, and 5, respectively.

60. Sarton, “Divorce of Lovers,” 207.

61. May Sarton, Letters from Maine (New York: Norton, 1984), 18-27.

62. Mrs. Stevens, 92.

63. Sarton, “Divorce of Lovers,” 202.

64. Sarton, “Divorce of Lovers,” 205.

65. Sarton, “Divorce of Lovers,” 207.

66. May Sarton, “Furies,” in Collected Poems, 162.

67. May Sarton, “A Storm of Angels,” in Collected Poems, 69.

68. May Sarton, “Control,” in Halfway to Silence (New York: Norton, 1980), 32.

69. May Sarton, “After the Tiger,” in Collected Poems, 321-22.

70. Louise Bogan, “The Sleeping Fury,” in Blue Estuaries, 78-79.

71. May Sarton, “Godhead as Lynx,” in Collected Poems, 352-53.

72. May Sarton, “The Muse as Medusa,” in Collected Poems, 332.

73. Mrs. Stevens, 161.

74. Mrs. Stevens, 155-56.

75. May Sarton, “She Shall Be Called Woman,” in Collected Poems, 20-26.

76. May Sarton, “An Observation,” in Collected Poems, 271.

77. Sarton discussed this poem and her difficulties in writing it in a speech entitled “Proteus: The Joys and Hazards of Being a Poet,” St. Benedict's College, St. Joseph, Minn., November 24, 1980.

78. Mrs. Stevens, 156.

79. May Sarton, “The Invocation to Kali,” in Collected Poems, 316-17.

80. H. D., End to Torment (New York: New Directions, 1979), 35.

81. Sarton, “Invocation to Kali,” 316-20.

82. Adrienne Rich, “Motherhood: The Contemporary Emergency and the Quantum Leap,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 260.

83. May Sarton, “Of the Muse,” in Halfway to Silence, 62.

84. Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” in On Lies, 186-88.

85. Sarton, “Of the Muse,” 62.

This essay is reprinted by permission of the publisher from Mary K. DeShazer, Inspiring Women: Reimagining the Muse (New York: Pergamon Press, © 1987 by Pergamon Press. All rights reserved.), pp. 111-35.