[In the following essay, Hunting argues against critics who consider Sarton's works to be simplistic and overly genteel.]

In his Preface to A History of Science, George Sarton, the pre-eminent scholar in his field, writes:

Nature is full of wonderful things—shells, flowers, birds, stars—that one never tires of observing, but the most wonderful things of all to my mind are the words of men, not the vain multiplicity of words that flow out of a garrulous mouth, but the skilful and loving choice of them that falls from wise and sensitive lips. … The words and phrases used by men and women throughout the ages are the loveliest flowers of humanity.¹

This passage is remarkable not only for its tone of animated reverence but for its unselfconscious sentiments and simplicity of language. These qualities, easy and amazing as sunlight, shine throughout the work—volume after volume on shelf after shelf in private and public libraries in most of the world—of George Sarton's daughter, May Sarton. They have caused her work to be labelled sentimental, genteel, privileged, simplistic: all those pejoratives of an age in which reason is less than venerated and in which violence is confused with emotion. Let us see. Let us begin by looking at Sarton's essay “The Writing of a Poem,” in which she calls poetry “a holy game”:

In what does the “holiness” of the game of poetry consist? Is it not in the quality of the experience that precedes the writing? For the writing of poetry is first of all a way of life, and only secondarily a means of expression. It is a life discipline one might almost say, a discipline maintained in order to perfect the instrument of experiencing—the poet himself—so that he may learn to keep himself perfectly open and transparent, so that he may meet everything that comes his way with an innocent eye.²

First, then, the poet's life and his response to it. Next, the heightening of consciousness, akin to that of the mystic: “The mystic induces a state of extreme awareness, the visionary state, by his own disciplines” (p. 40).

We move, if we are worthy of our task, toward a purer innocence and a purer wisdom until at the very end we may attain what Coleridge has defined as the function of poetry, that state when the familiar is wonderful and the wonderful is familiar, and when the simplest object has seeds of revelation in it.

Simone Weil puts it, “Absolute attention is prayer.” The eye of the poet must give to the object this kind of attention. He is to see what he sees as if it had been just created, and he is to communicate it to us as if we had never seen it before. But if you look at almost anything, a rock, a tree, a lizard in this way, you learn something. The prayer is in the looking; the answer to the prayer is the poem which describes the object and also does something more, is something more than the object itself.

(p. 42)

And she continues, “Poetry one might say is the perpetual reincarnation of the spirit through a concrete image” (p. 43). But do these adjurations seem, to late twentieth century ears, too pietistic, with their religious vocabulary—“holiness,” “disciplines,” “prayer,” “reincarnation”? Are they, in George Sarton's words, too “severe and uncompromising”?³ What about that alternative old-shoe attractiveness of Robert Frost's mischievous “Poetry is the kind of thing poets write”;⁴ is May Sarton not only too sober but too serious?

Here is “Prayer Before Work,” which opens, in her Collected Poems (1974), the selection from Inner Landscape, first published in 1939 when Sarton was twenty-seven:

Great one, austere,
By whose intent the distant star
Holds its course clear,
Now make this spirit soar—
Give it that ease.
Out of the absolute
Abstracted grief, comfortless, mute
Sound the clear note,
Pure, piercing as the flute:
Give it precision.
Austere, great one,
By whose grace the inalterable song
May still be wrested from
The corrupt lung:
Give it strict form.(5)

Three stanzas, three attributes invoked. To take the last first, “form.” The stanzas run a,a,a,a,b; c,c,c,c,d; e,e,e,e,f. The patterning seems rigid in its consistency, but in fact Sarton has allowed herself great scope in the play of sound, using both exact and slant rhymes, internal and external assonance and alliteration, and the semi-cesurae which surround the many spondees and make the sound-sense of the latter stand out, as in “course clear,” “clear note,” “strict form.” Next, “precision.” Each word in “Prayer before Work” has been chosen, not one is unnecessary. Most are linked by the process of interweaving vowels and consonants: “austere” to “whose” to “distant,” “austere” to “star,” “course” to “soar” to “ease,” to cite examples from only the first stanza. And the effect of the non-rhyming last line of each stanza is to open it upwards, in a gesture eloquent as lifting arms to the sun. Thirdly, “ease.” This kind of ease has nothing to do with facility, which Sarton in her essay “The School of Babylon” terms “the enemy of poetry.”⁶ Rather it evokes the image of the eagle resting on the wind, or of Shelley's skylark which “singing still doth soar, and soaring ever singest.” Such ease does not come without effort. This early poem is not only the answer to its own prayer but a presage of hundreds of poems to come. It is manifestly the poem of a calling. A further comment: one test of a successful poem is that it have an element of technical surprise which is so subtle that most readers or listeners will notice it only subliminally. Yet it will be this paradoxically hidden element which ensures the poem's power. In “Prayer before Work,” it is not the stunning image of the “corrupt lung”; not the skillful change rung of “Great one, austere” to “Austere, great one”; not the ingenious contradiction of “mute / Sound.” Seen or heard, it is the wrenching of “from” in the line “May still be wrested from” to “form” in the line “Give it strict form.” Preposition to noun, becoming to being—Sarton has “wrested” as well as been given the poem's “form.” Upon this action, the poem stays.

Of course not all of Sarton's poetry is so compressed. In fact, her structures are Protean in their variety. Tercets, sestinas, couplets, quatrains, free verse, blank verse, imagistic verse, lyrics, letter poems, sonnets, the entire range of poetic territory is explored in her eleven separate volumes. Her themes too are large: nature, love, art, death, ephēmeros, permanence, inner and outer landscape. Her technical, intellectual, and temperamental scope is such as to launch her into the environs of greatness. Yet she also touches on smaller, homelier subjects: gardening, teaching, housekeeping, friends. If, then, her poetry is so inexhaustibly varied, in what consists its individuality? What have the lines “Downstairs the plumber / Is emptying the big tank, / Water-logged” to do with these which face them on the opposite page, “All lovers sow and reap their harvests from / This flesh ever to be renewed and reconceived / As the bright ploughs break open the dark loam”?⁷

What keeps the poems hers is the mind and spirit behind them. It is a mind at once complicated and straightforward, a spirit both sensitive and resilient. The mind of an educator and a learner, the spirit of a lover and a child. But these are not separate; and they are both private and public. Hence the political poems like “The Invocation to Kali” and “A Ballad of the Sixties,” charming animal poems like “A Parrot” and “Eine Kleine Snailmusik,” the ‘brush-stroke’ poems like “Japanese Prints” and “A Country House,” and the splendid sonnet sequences like “These Images Remain” and “A Divorce of Lovers” are not only possible but achieved. But how are they achieved? What are their salient likenesses?

Colors, for one thing. Random lines show “The fresh water-color / Green of rice” (“Notes from India”); “We come to Chartres, riding the green plain” (“Return to Chartres”); “Country of still canals, green willows, golden fields” (“Homage to Flanders”); “In leaf-rich golden winds” (“The First Autumn”); “In Kashmir the sheer sapphire of that flight” (“Ballads of the Traveler”); “At dawn we wake to rose and amber meadows, / At noon plunge on across the waves of white” (“The House in Winter”).⁸ Not colors for their own sake, but colors melded with image. Image! Concerning which Sarton writes in her essay “The Writing of a Poem”:

I believe that if one were to isolate one quality and one only as essential to the poetic nature, it would be the poet's instinctive tendency to translate the abstract into the concrete, to think in images. For the business of poetry is to bring thought alive, to make a thought into an experience, and we experience through the senses. The means of doing this is the image.⁹

Poets usually gather in their works a cluster, a constellation of images whose connotative meanings are expressive of certain aspects of existence which are important, even necessary to them and which they use as indices of concepts and emotions. George Sarton, who began by wanting to be a poet, uses “shells, flowers, birds, stars” to show that “Nature is full of wonderful things.” This is a very simple, though by no means simple-minded, method of bringing “thought alive,” by examples. His daughter uses a similar cluster as title for her volume Cloud, Stone, Sun, Vine (1961). Other recurrent images in her poems are swans (serenity, pure grace), silence (the still point of passion), fields (rich existence), the seacoast (battling existence), air (ecstasy of spirit), light (benison). Not always are these connotated thus, but often enough to consistently suggest such meanings. They are not obtrusive but they are intrinsic. They seem simple—poets have used them for centuries—but the more Sarton's poems are read and pondered, the more depth they reveal. Hers is, in a way, deceptive art: the clarity of the images obscures their tenacious roots. They bloom, they do not explode.

The breath of their blooming is Sarton's supple line, which by no means lacks gentle shock. Again and again she bends it, provides it with an unexpected rhythm or rhyme which at first reading seems not true, seems even somewhat awkward:

All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.(10)

(from “Now I Become Myself”)

“Silence,” “intense” surely appear ill-yoked, and the line “Gathered into one intense” scans inconveniently compared to the effortless accents and flow of the other tetrameters. To ‘fit it in’ is to distort it: “Gathered into one intense.” Very well, do not attempt exactitude but read it as ordinary speech: “Gathered into one intense / Gesture …” and discover how the line-break acts to heighten the intensity of forcing exhalation, then inhalation, then exhalation on “Gesture,” which now becomes a substantial experience towards the image “growing like a plant.” Sarton has here brought “thought alive,” brought “thought into experience,” and not the other way around as with didactic poets (and she has been called didactic).

Beyond breath there is sound, and commingled with sound, sense. Two poems in A Private Mythology (1966) treat the same scene but different subjects. They are thus instructive to examine for techniques towards effect and to measure the extent of Sarton's daring:

“IN KASHMIR”

Lovers of water and light
Rest on a silvery fleece,
Lost among willows and sheep.
The lake, a quiet eye,
Reflects on interchanges
Between clouds and the ranges.
And on this shallow mirror
The narrow long boats glide,
Turning white peaks aside.
While on his watching-pole,
A kingfisher, intent,
His long bill water-bent,
Makes a black, slanting line.
He focuses the scene,
The silver and the green.
Long pause, complete suspense—
And then the piercing dive
Shakes all the reeds alive.
The flash of sapphire blue
And mirror-breaking lance
Makes even mountains dance.
Back on his watching-pole
The king who got his wish
Swallows a little fish.(11)

FROM “BALLADS OF THE TRAVELER”

O tell us, friend, what wonders there are
In far Kashmir, in ancient Srinagar?
In Srinagar, a world of snow and sky
Where the shikaras, shallow long boats, ply,
I saw a kingfisher, watching a fish,
Sit his long pole with concentrated wish—
Wait, wait, wait—then take the dive
And swallow his bright wriggling catch alive.
In Kashmir the sheer sapphire of that flight
Hit like a shot the bull's-eye of delight.(12)

“In Kashmir” is written in tercets, a trimeter. The first line of each stanza is unrhymed. This much is clear at a glance. Now the subtleties begin. The metrical foot of the first stanza is dactylic, the beat of Virgil's Aeneid, and the lines are in trimeter, exactly half the length of Virgil's hexameter. The poem, therefore, is to be an epic in miniature. The fact that the second, sixth, and seventh stanzas are iambic does not vitiate the announcement of the first, nor does the fact that the third, fourth, fifth, and eighth are mixed dactylic and iambic. These variations point up the playfulness of Sarton's approach, its technical sense of humor. (She is serious; not sober, here.) It is the last line of the third stanza, the first of the fourth and fifth stanzas which are dactylic, and the first and last of the eighth, all either announcing or reminding of the main scheme. The focus of the scene, as Sarton states, is the kingfisher. The sounds depicting the setting are, like it, calm, meditative: alliterative, too, those l's, for example, so innocently scattered through the first four stanzas, until they come together in the single line “Makes a black, slanting line” and make that mark actually visible. The dash after “Long pause, complete suspense—” is the mark of that suspense and the presentiment of the “piercing dive” after which the sounds become plosive: “shakes,” “flash,” “breaking.” The final stanza has the quality of an ironic fable. This “king” gets a little “wish,” the august personage is in contrast to the smallness of his desire. Is this the lesson? That humans too, these beings little less than angels, set their desires too low? Yet the kingfisher's wish is also proper to him, for even kings must eat. Here is the thought of the experience; and “little” in the phrase “little fish” echoes ripples on the surface of the poem as it does on the lake.

The seven stanzas of “Ballads of the Traveler” are fuller and longer than those of “In Kashmir.” The second, “kingfisher” stanza is typical, being written in couplets and in ten lines. Although the first stanza is wholly pentameter, the second varies the beat to tetrameter in the first and fifth lines. (The lines of the other stanzas are, with one exception, also in pentameter.) After the regular iambic pentameter of the initial stanza, “O tell us, friend, what wonders there are” comes like a fold in a hitherto smooth garment. It is startling; it seems slightly clumsy compared to the poem's opening couplet, “O traveler, tell, what marvels did you see / In old Japan over the shining sea?” It requires effort; and rightly so, for its effect is that of the questioner's interest truly aroused—it is as though the questioner is now leaning forward in anticipation of a response as unusual as that of the first stanza, which speaks of “a thinking garden” made “of rocks arranged in sand.” Nor is the listener disappointed, for the response is once more mysteriously simple: “I saw a kingfisher, watching a fish.” This line too is in tetrameter, thus responding in kind to the opening phrase of the interrogator. Further, its foot is dactylic, endowing it with a hint of mythical grandeur in contrast to the more ordinary predominantly iambic foot of the stanza. Although the scene is the same as that of “In Kashmir,” in “Ballads of the Traveler” the emphasis is on the kingfisher's dive rather than on his getting his wish. The dive is re-described in the closing couplet, and in high poetic language. Very different from the plain “take the dive” is “In Kashmir the sheer sapphire of that flight / Hit like a shot the bull's-eye of delight,” and different again from “The flash of sapphire blue / And mirror-breaking lance” of “In Kashmir.” In the first place, the line in “Ballads of the Traveler” is longer, so, therefore, is the “flight.” Also there are two dashes here, used for the same purpose as the single dash in “In Kashmir,” but presaging as well the re-description of the dive. And how relatively unextraordinary is “The flash of sapphire blue” compared to “In Kashmir the sheer sapphire of that flight”! With its multiple s's and sh-ph sounds, its extended vowels, the down-turn of the sound of “flight” echoing the visual action to “Hit like a shot,” the lines themselves are the pure experience that poetic image gives. The lesson is in the experience rather than in thought, and the “delight” can be endless. That is the lesson of the art and of the artist.

Sarton is, after all, her mother's daughter also. Anyone who has seen the exquisitely embroidered dresses and accessories that Mabel Elwes Sarton made for the child May is affected by wonder at the inventiveness of the curving designs of flowers and vines, at the soft, brilliant colors—pomegranate, emerald, flame. Done in a mixture of silk and wool threads, much like crewelwork but more delicate in execution, often on voile, that sturdy, fragile-looking fabric, the designs are images of poignancy and joy. The wool deepens; the silk gleams. Each stitch enhances the whole composition.

In the Preface to A History of Science, George Sarton writes:

Nothing is more moving than the contemplation of the means found by men to express their thoughts and feelings, and the comparison of the divers means used by them from time to time and from place to place. … There is so much virtue in each word; indeed, the whole past from the time when the word was coined is crystallized in it; it represents not only clear ideas, but endless ambiguities; each word is a treasure house of realities and illusions, of truths and enigmas.¹³

If May Sarton inherits her attitudes towards work and words from her father and his graceful, generous stance, like him she does not “write for philologists” but “for educated people in general.”¹⁴ She does not write for academics, although she loves learning and teaching, but for the educable of heart and spirit as well as of mind. That is why her poetry is deceptively clear. Light falls poorly on stagnant pools. Her aim is to clarify the water so that the light of art shines at its best. The prayer for “ease,” “precision,” and “form” forms the ground of all of her work. Then comes the “delight,” the spell of sound and sense, music and image. But craft must also enter in, and Sarton's skills are at once bold and fine, daring in the defiance of banality, intricate in the minute patterning of the large design. May Sarton's poetry is indeed a splendid achievement. “The risk is very great.”¹⁵ It is, after all, a life.

Notes

1. George Sarton, A History of Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. vii.

2. May Sarton, Writings on Writing (Orono, Maine: Puckerbrush Press, 1980), p. 40.

3. Cited in X. J. Kennedy, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 453.

4. See note 1.

5. May Sarton, Collected Poems, 1930-1973 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), p. 31.

6. May Sarton, Writings on Writing, p. 19.

7. May Sarton, Halfway to Silence (New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 56, 57.

8. All examples from Collected Poems, 1930-1973.

9. May Sarton, Writings on Writing, p. 45.

10. May Sarton, Collected Poems, 1930-1973, p. 156.

11. Ibid., p. 249.

12. Ibid., p. 260.

13. See note 1.

14. Ibid.

15. May Sarton, Writings on Writing, p. 46.