SOURCE: Casey, Beth. “May Sarton and the Muse: Lovers, Water, and Leaves.” In A House of Gathering: Poets on May Sarton's Poetry, edited and with an introduction by Marilyn Kallet, pp. 211-28. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Casey discusses Sarton's humanistic poetics.]

The mysterious muse, the source of poetic vision, has been the central focus of May Sarton's poetry and poetics for over sixty years. For Sarton, the muse opens the poetic dialogue with the self, confirming and releasing that poetic identity necessary to the creative act and to participation in the experience we have called the sublime. In two of her fables, Joanna and Ulysses and The Poet and the Donkey, she depicts the essential relationship of the muse to nature and to human care and compassion; and in her novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, she explores the psychological origins of poetic inspiration in human love. The unique achievement of Sarton's poetry, as well as her successful revisions of the American tradition of the sublime, are best revealed through an understanding of her mythologizing of the muse and her representation of this crucial life experience over time. The muse allows her to mediate what she has termed “the daily conflict between art and life” (At Seventy [hereafter cited as AS] 132). As she writes in Recovering, “I reach and have reached the timeless movement, the pure suspension within time, only through love” (Recovering [hereafter cited as RE] 188).

The muse, for Sarton, is always a woman. “The seizure,” she writes, “when it came, was so commanding I could not doubt its value. I could not believe I was wrong or aberrant. It gave me courage to be myself and not to allow the ethos of the times to blur my vision” (AS 91). The fact confirmed her belief that women must understand themselves “as central, not peripheral” before anything real can happen (The House by the Sea [hereafter cited as TH] 224). William Drake, in his study of modern women poets writing between 1915 and 1945—a revolutionary period that includes Teasdale, Wylie, Moore, Bogan, and St. Vincent Millay—declares Sarton's work “a kind of watershed in women's poetry in its deliberate avoidance of indirection and artistic gameplaying in order to overcome the incapacitating effects of gender delimitation” (261). Sarton was the first of the modern women poets to acknowledge the sources of her strength with emotional candor and forthrightness. Drake quotes Sarton's unpublished letter to Louise Bogan in which she notes that the relationship to “the muse” is a breaking out of yourself to find yourself and is not to be confused with sex. She writes, “One never reaches the deepest place of feeling part of the almost unconscious universe, of being lost. Instead one reaches a place of extreme consciousness; one is found as an individual” (Drake 264). Sarton's changing relationship to the muse constructs the path to individuation which parallels her successful poetic achievement.

In her journals and memoirs, Sarton explores the sources of the sustaining mythologies of her work, including her meditations on the muse. In A World of Light [hereafter cited as AW], she narrates an unusual encounter with a family friend, Edith Forbes Kennedy, who once rescued her when she was very young from a difficult personal situation and whom she also credits with being the first to teach her to think clearly and hard about feelings. Sarton writes that this encounter may serve as “a perfect example of a seizure by the muse” (AW 91). The event involved an extraordinary coincidence. Sarton returned from Europe to visit Edith with a story about a man who turned out to have been Edith's lover at an earlier time. The tumult of emotion which seized Edith at the time catalyzed the young Sarton and resulted in an outpouring of poems, which she later published as Inner Landscape, her second book. The writing of these poems was a joyous release into gift giving; the virtues of a strong muse she details as “contemplative, listening with great attention, critical yet completely detached” (AW 99). It is, thus, not surprising to discover Sarton's fictional character Hilary, in Sarton's novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing [hereafter cited as MS], relating the same anecdote about being brought to an outpouring of poems by her friend Willa, who succeeds 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” (MS 141). For Sarton, the source of creation or transcendence lies within the nexus of human relationship but does not involve possession or internalization of the other, whether the other is nature or human nature. This stance allows her to confront the transcendental sublime, creatively, in her identity as a woman and thus opens the door to a different point of origin, a nonpatriarchal line of descent.

Mary K. DeShazer, in her study Inspiring Women: Reimagining the Muse, examines the frequent tendency of women poets to construct “a revised and revitalized female muse,” “a mother-goddess-sister-self of her own invention and design” (6). Margaret Homans, in her study of women writers and poetic identity, also concurs that a recovery of maternal origins not only supports creativity and reestablishes genealogy but acknowledges that the rest of the world is not to be possessed and, thus, encourages a different relationship to otherness (Homans 17). A redefinition of her relationship to the source of imagination, however, does not simultaneously redefine a woman's relationship with her poetic precursors. As Joanne Feit Diehl notes in her work on women poets and the American Sublime, women poets most often perceive themselves as “exceptions, as isolates, departing from, rather than building upon, a tradition” (2). In contrast, the male poet aligns himself with the patriarchal voices of his progenitors, assumes his superiority to them, and simultaneously accesses his muse, his source of a relationship to nature and imagination, at his will.

In “My Sisters, O My Sisters,” an early poem, Sarton expresses this sense of isolation and exception and seeks both to create an alternative line of descent, a matriarchal genealogy, and to deliver a critique of female precursors (Collected Poems (1930–73) [hereafter cited as CP] 74). Part 1 of the poem, written in five-stress couplets playing against the rhythms of speech, describes women poets as “strange monsters who renounce the treasure / Of their silence for a curious devouring pleasure” (CP 74). Sarton finds in Dickinson, Rosetti, and Sappho the need to build “inward in fearful isolation,” the renunciation of sexuality, the awareness of something “lost, strained, unforgiven” in the poet. She looks forward to a fuller release of personhood for the woman poet:

To be through what we make more simply human To 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.

(CP 75)

In the last line of this poetic invocation of her precursors, Sarton metaphorically seizes the sun, boldly renaming the feminine power with the dominant masculine image in Western poetry for the logos, centrality, or Reason.

In Part 3 of the poem, she quests for the source of “the fertile feminine goddess, double river,” the origin of woman's double nature, to create a new genealogy for the necessity “To be Eve, the giver of knowledge, the lover; / To be Mary, the shield, the healer and the mother” (CP 76-77). In conclusion, in Part 4, she mourns how far from home, “how parted from / The earth, my sisters, O my sisters, we have come!” (CP 77); and she seeks for the liberation of passion “from deep in the earth” and for that free expression of joy and anger necessary for fully human creation. In the controversial final stanza of the poem, Sarton is forced to name the joy of creation “a masculine and violent joy,” as her quest is not yet concluded. In a later journal she notes that Sappho should have been brought into the conclusion of “Sisters, O My Sisters!,” as the true precursor of those in the light of “that sun, the feminine power” (AS 91).

It is the muse who accompanies Sarton's journey to a fully human poetry and to an imagination faithful to the earth. In an early poem, “The Lady and the Unicorn,” she invokes the pathos and irony of the legend of the unicorn and his virgin consort, in this instance the version depicted on the Cluny tapestries. The sad unicorn and lady constitute a still life “woven into history,” as the mythical beast bows his head, recognizing one whose beauty was not cast for him, “so sweetly lost, so strangely wed” (CP 78). “You are the lady woven into history / Imagination is our bridal bed: / We lie ghostly upon it, no word said.” (CP 78). The unicorn is rewarded forever with “this shining tragedy,” as Sarton critiques the curious worship of the virgin in a powerful couplet: “Know we are woven all in mystery, / The wound imagined where no one has bled” (CP 78). Sarton presents in “The Lady and the Unicorn” an ironic inversion of Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Recall Keats's “She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, / Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” Sarton's realistic portrayal does not celebrate the “still unravished bride,” “forever panting and forever young.” The union of virgin and unicorn produces no creative joy. It begins instead to deconstruct the mystery of this cold pastoral.

In all her early work, Sarton strives to articúlate a relationship between the flesh and the spirit, between the lion and the rose, which will be productive of poetry and, concomitantly, of a human life and a kinship with nature. In “The Sacred Order,” a poem for her father, she writes, “Never forget this when the talk is clever: / Wisdom must be born in the flesh or wither” (CP 86). But the quest is arduous. In the dreamlike atmosphere of “The Second Spring,” the muse is a woman embodying nature lying at the bottom of a green field. Birds' wings flash in her open eyes. She is a plant, a stream, a source, a mysterious flow, forever rooted and forever passing:

When will the diviner be sent for, to strike
The hidden source with his wand, and there the wand
Leap out of his hands as the waters wake,
She wake from her dream, alive and stunned. …

(CP 102)

In “Because What I Want Most Is Permanence,” she strives to articulate a relationship with the muse which will “free the complicated act of will,” and produce “The long unwinding and continuous flow / Of subterranean rivers out of sense,”—a permanent stream of poetry. Deliberately in this poem, however, she moves away from a vision of a sexual union with the muse, which she associates with the “blue Atlantic where the sailors dream / Their girls under the waves and in the foam—” (CP 137). Instead she writes:

I set my mind to artful work and craft,
I set my heart on friendship, hard and fast
Against the wild inflaming wink of chance
And all sensations opened in a glance.

(CP 137)

The poet “banks the blaze within,” bringing her muse “years of praise” instead of “hours of fire.” The sailors' vision may be suggestive of possession, a relationship to be eschewed in Sarton's work.

In “Binding the Dragon,” Proteus is the mythical name of transcendent being, the dragon of reality, which the poet wants alive in his fist, but neither possessed nor killed. The poet's analyst suggests he sublimate, but desire must somehow be released in the poet's work. “And so he wept and cursed the analyst.” (CP 187). Again in “The Action of the Beautiful,” Sarton presents the image of the beloved's face, poised between silence and speech, suggesting an “inward music” and uniting multiple and fragmented images, “the broken radiance of reality.” Thus, she concludes, “And I, the stranger, centered in your presence, / Come home and walk into the heart of peace.” (CP 163).

This vision of detachment with relationship—an “essence” of reality—is vividly depicted in another poem from the late fifties: “In Time Like Air,” a metaphysical lyric, comparing the self in love's “early transformation” to a mysterious salt that dissolves in water and yet is present—both lost and found at last. “Without a future or a past, / And a whole life suspended in it” (CP 182). In the last stanza Sarton finds in an extended conceit a way of describing the newly emerging and transformed self as a salt crystallizing out of water into air—out of its loving union into detachment.

The faultless crystal of detachment
Comes after, cannot be created
Without the first intense attachment.
Even the saints achieve this slowly;
For us, more human and less holy,
In time like air is essence stated.

(CP 182)

But the process of individuation accompanying the growth of a poet's imagination cannot be entirely smooth. As Paula Bennett argues in her study of women's creativity, My Life a Loaded Gun, women's inability to access anger can make it all but impossible for them to develop the ego strength necessary for them to become artists or perhaps even to survive (263). In the late 1960s the anger generated during the social protest movements pushed many women poets toward a renewed confrontation with their inner feelings. Dominant among the images women poets chose to express their newly discovered sense of self is the figure of the Medusa. Bennett cites immediately Sarton's poem “The Muse as Medusa” as a primary example of this new symbol for the woman poet's “liberated self” (Bennett 245). The poem marks a turning in Sarton's work, perhaps first initiated by the sonnet sequence “A Divorce of Lovers,” in which the traditional theme, a lover's celebration of a muse who represents her idealized self, is replaced by a difficult struggle between two lovers who cannot reconcile. “The Muse as Medusa” appears in A Grain of Mustard Seed, a volume published in the late sixties, which includes several poems of protest as well as meditations on the violence of modern war. The volume ends with such poems as “The Godhead as Lynx,” “The Waves,” and “Beyond the Question,” in which Sarton begins to establish a new relationship to nature, both autonomous and correspondent, which emerges directly from her ability to deal with the rage at times encountered even in loving relationships.

In “The Muse as Medusa” Sarton depicts herself and her thoughts and wishes as fish swimming in the ocean of Medusa's silence: the cold lover. Medusa was loved by Poseidon, god of the ocean, the source and mother of our lives. Perseus, who does not appear in the poem, slew her, and from her blood emerged Pegasus, the winged horse of poetry, presumably in recognition of the mediating power of Perseus's shield. Sarton's psyche, her “fish,” has been bold and venturesome in love, often encountering powerful emotions.

The fish escaped to many a magic reef;
The fish explored many a dangerous sea—
The fish, Medusa, did not come to grief,
But swims still in a fluid mystery.

(CP 332)

She finds useless Medusa's “abdication by total lack of motion,” for the world of feeling is “fluid still,” and “love is healing, even rootless love.” The final stanza boldly reveals Sarton's representation of the psychological truth of the myth:

I turn your face around. It is my face.
That frozen rage is what I must explore—
Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place!
This is the gift I thank Medusa for.

(CP 332)

Sarton has written of her own worst angers, which occur when she is unjustly criticized or attacked or prevented from leading her “real life,” i.e., having to break chosen solitude because of too many external demands (AS 196). She also links personal rage to national violence and argues for the necessity of nations as well as people to detach themselves—to turn the image of violence around—in order to look hard at the cause for violent behavior. She writes:

How can we deal with it, the violence in ourselves? Somehow or other we have to find a way, religious or not, of sanctifying life again, for only if we can do that will it be possible to face the worst, and still bear with it in ourselves and heal it in ourselves, because we have again become part of the mystery, given up some primary need to terrorize and subdue, and quite literally fallen on our knees.

(AS 196)

It is the last passage concerning the surrender of domination necessary to become part of the mystery that is most important for a clear understanding of Sarton's later poetry.

In “The Invocation to Kali” Sarton seeks to overcome rage by understanding it, though she acknowledges that at times she thinks “only of killing / “The voracious animal / Who is my perpetual shame,” Kali is the terrible goddess of both creation and destruction:

I am the cage where poetry
Paces and roars. The beast
Is the god. How murder the god?
How live with the terrible god?

(CP 316)

At times, “The Invocation to Kali” becomes prosaic as Sarton struggles to illuminate the subject, but the language of the poem itself argues the difficulty of expression:

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.

(CP 317)

Violence is within us, “the kingdom of Kali,” “the built-in destroyer” and cannot be overthrown. Until “the destroyer, has been blest, / There will be no child, no flower, and no wine” (CP 317). In Part 3, she turns to the horror of the concentration camps, and in the fourth section, “The Time of Burning,” she recognizes the need to pray for self-knowledge:

But she must have her dreadful empire first
Until the prisons of the mind are broken free
And every suffering center at its worst
Can be appealed to her dark mystery.

(CP 319)

The poem concludes with a realization of pain, anger, and subsequent violence as “the balance-wheel for our vulnerable, aching love” (CP 320).

Such deepening understanding results, in A Grain of Mustard Seed, in some of Sarton's finest poems. A new humility allows her to separate from nature while simultaneously voicing, as if from within, its wisdom and will. “The boom, the constant connonade” of ocean and “the turning back of tides and their returning” in “The Waves,” Sarton's courageous swerve from Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach,” is representative of this new understanding. The lover addresses her beloved not as Arnold does, “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!” in a world that lies before us without joy, love, or light, without certitude, peace or help for pain, but in a different context.

Oh love, let us be true then to this will—
Not to each other, human and defeated,
But to great power, our Heaven and our Hell,
That thunders out its triumph unabated,
And is never still.
For we are married to this rocky coast,
To the charge of huge waves upon it,
The ceaseless war, the tide gained and then lost,
And ledges worn down smooth but not downcast—
Wild rose and granite.

(CP 354)

Arnold finds his lovers on “the darkling plain” from which the Sea of Faith on which he depends has been withdrawn. Sarton finds a will in nature itself, directly related to a will found in the lovers themselves:

Here in the darkness of the stillest wood,
Absence, the ocean, tires us with its roar;
We bear love's thundering rumor in the blood
Beyond our understanding, ill or good—
Listen, once more!

(CP 354)

Sarton's lovers cannot construct a dyadic unit separated from the earth, but are natural inhabitants of the world regardless of loss or “distant wars.” In “Beyond the Question,” she writes,

Voices do not speak
From a cloud,
But we are inhabited.

(CP 357)

But in “The Godhead as Lynx,” though she feels a longing “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,” she nevertheless indicates her necessary human separation from this godhead, as an emergent, compassionate, though guilt-ridden, being who “groans and thinks” (CP 353).

Sarton's last three volumes, published in the eighties, manifest an increasingly intense recognition of the mystery and necessity of the human muse. It is not surprising that they contain her most successful poems. Halfway to Silence is a frank celebration of sensuosity leavened by the wisdom of older years. The title poem reveals immediately the pressure of approaching death. “Halfway to silence,” “halfway to land's end,” the poet hears the voice of her muse and asks, “Shall I take you with me?” (HS 5). There is, she reveals, no choice. Without the muse, no poetry exists. But this muse is neither Petrarch's Laura who is poetry, and, therefore, cannot be a poet, nor Dante's dead Beatrice, whose spiritual image leads him to the divine. As Lawrence Lipking notes, for Dante, poetry stands at the center of existence, not love, which appears only by poetic license (21). Philosophical truth reigns, as Dante records his growth as a poet, and not on a mortal but on a spiritual plane.

It is the separation of such planes which Sarton resists in her late poetry, though mysteries are manifold, and the encounter with them once again revises the poet's relationship to nature and newly challenges her. In “Three Things,” for example, she strives to express the transformation she experiences during a walk in the woods when the force of love which she carries in her head encounters “the shiver of poplar leaves,” “the threshing of water over stone.”

Three things for which no one has found a word—
Wind in the poplar, tremor under the skin
Deep in the flesh, a shiver of more than blood
When lovers, water, and leaves are wholly one.

(HS 25)

“Three Things,” however, remains a simple record of a suspended movement in time. “After the Storm” reveals the evidence of the transformation and renewal inherent in love, as the poet senses the same experience in nature in the song of the “peepers singing out so sweet and frail” above the pounding roar of surf, suggesting “something is going right.” “Whatever locked love cannot bear to do, / The tree frogs can and spring is breaking through” (HS 42).

In “In Suffolk” the poet mourns the lost sequence of lovers: “To what have I been faithful in the end?” And yet she recalls the faithfulness inherent in changes and transformations, in falling in love and detaching, and she acknowledges herself:

… faithful only to these,
To earth itself turning toward the fall,
To earth's relentless changing mysteries.

(HS 56)

Only the earth itself consoles “the many times bereaved.”

The poem, life itself, labor of birth
Has been forced back again and again
To find renewal in the fertile earth.

(HS 56)

Sarton's ability to identify herself with the earth as maternal matrix results in a celebration of the harvest “so rich it fills my bin. / What had to grow has been allowed to grow” (HS 56).

A new and elegant transparency, poetry standing naked in its bare bones, marks Sarton's late work. We look through the poetry to the experience itself as in “The Summer Tree.”

In all the summer glut of green,
Serrated leaves, a dark and shifty screen,
Catalpa flowers, unseasonal surprise,
To tense the landscape up for drowsy eyes.
We come alive beholding points of white,
Among the leaves, immense rosettes alight.
The blessing of pure form that open space
And makes us stop and look in sudden peace.

(HS 46)

The four and five stress lines emphasize the rhythms of natural speech as the rhymed couplets remind us of “the blessing of pure form that opens space,” and the final unrhymed couplet enhances and focuses our stopping and looking at “space” in “peace.”

Celebrating this transparency Sarton “prunes the orchard,” in a poem of that title, cutting overgrowth to improve her harvest of poems with fruit “more crisp and rare”:

Muse, pour strength into my pruning wrist
That I may cut the way toward open space,
A timeless orchard, poetry-possessed,
There without guilt to contemplate your face.

(HS 50)

In “A Voice,” she depicts the mysterious experience of the inner music liberated by the muse. In powerful four-stressed rhymed tetrameters, reminiscent of Coleridge's depiction in “Kubla Khan” of Alph the sacred river, it appears:

Blurred as though it has been woken
From an underground and secret river,
This voice itself and not the language spoken
Has made the air around me shiver.

(HS 21)

The poet's destiny is a journey in quest of the mysterious source to “bless the magic throat (HS 21). The drumbeat returns in the poem “Control,” which, like an earlier poem acknowledging being as an ungraspable protean god, portrays possession by the muse as a wild proud tiger who can be blessed but not seized or captured.

You may have complete control.
There will be no roar or growl.
But can you look into those eyes
Where the smothered fire lies?
Tame the tiger. Break his pride.
You will find yourself outside
With all those who can destroy
Tiger love and tiger joy.

(HS 32)

It is essential to realize that Sarton's “seeing” constitutes her own unique version of the American sublime. This is not Emerson's direction to his American poet: “Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse” (Emerson 326). For the mysterious experience of Sarton's muse lies within human relationship itself. Nor is Sarton's “art” either man's or woman's will applied to nature for purposes of possession and domination. Sarton writes in “Blizzard,” a poem making a swerve from Frost's “Stopping by Woods”: “New Englanders are skeptical / Of what cannot depend on will” (SN 17). Nor is the self lost to transcendent spirit in Sarton's work as it is in Emerson. The father of the American sublime merges with his deity on a simple walk in the woods:

I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all: the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental.

(Emerson 189)

As Harold Bloom notes, “The final price paid for the extreme discontinuities of Emersonian vision is that we are left with a simple, chilling formula: the American sublime equals ‘I am the Abyss,’”—the abyss being tradition, history, or any other (Bloom 255). For Emerson, even nature vanishes as he becomes one with the world and assumes its authority. Bloom also observes that Wallace Stevens, in the last poem of his collected work, “Of Mere Being,” presents a sense of being beyond “human feeling or meaning” (Bloom 292-93).

Sarton's revisions of the sublime in such late poems as “Moose in the Morning” retain both the natural and the human and provide the reader with “seeing” itself. The freshly enabling vision she experiences in her encounter with the moose is depicted in the phrase “When all I can is see.” This extraordinary linguistic maneuver creates a verbal naming; and the moose, the wild and gentle beast, emerges as a promise kept, something “ancient” both lost and found at once. Sarton invokes the moose like a muse:

Oh wild and gentle beast,
Immense antlered shape,
This morning in the meadow!

(LM 41)

Her joy is experienced as “Wilderness and escape!” simultaneously retaining and escaping the natural. The guilt so often experienced at the appearance of a muse disappears.

You make a truant of me
This moose-enchanted day
When all I can is see,
When all I am is this
Astonishment and bliss.

(LM 41)

The poet observer experiences an intensification of human experience in the poem, the seeing self both lost and newly found in this enraptured experience. The supernatural is here experienced in the true meaning of the word, as an intensification of the natural.

In the elliptical poem “Shell,” Sarton paratactically places the sound of the “sea's susurration” alongside the “terrible silence” of a loveless house, transforming that house itself to a shell “Abandoned by the creature / Who lived there once / And opened to the tide.” In this meeting of the human and the natural an understanding is whispered in the silence of the shell-like house:

The rumor of a wave
Long ago broken
And drawn back
Into the ocean—
And so, with love.

(LM 33)

The lighted Christmas tree in “Christmas Light” is personified and feminized for the intimate encounter of human and nature: “She and I alone. / How softly she shone!”; and the solitary spectator experiences true presence, “Love distant, love detached / And strangely without weight.” Even absence itself, “the abyss,” is made almost familial in Sarton's poem of that title as she creates again the great white pine whose ample green branches she watched from her upstairs window, home for red squirrels and nuthatches:

Until a winter hurricane
Brought it, shuddering,
Down against the house,
Until that quiet strength
Was broken by force.

(SN 31)

Now she sees “Ragged firs / And formless bits of sky,” an “irritation,” and perceives “The air is silent.” The last phrase makes absence itself palpable, implying presence.

The masterful balance of nature and mystery is noted in the “The Muse as Donkey” as a conflict between the highway to the White Goddess and the omen provided by the presence “Within an island of trees” of a Great White Owl. Here, indeed, is the American side of Sarton. On the way to meet with the White Goddess she has a significant encounter:

A dead owl lay on the road,
Still warm.
I could lift the great soft wing
To its full span,
Brown and white.
I saw strong yellow legs
And a terrible beak.

(SN 67)

As she carries her “broken friend” to shelter she weeps, knowing there is “hard news ahead.” The human poet cannot leave nature entirely for the house of the White Goddess nor can she deny her vision. For she has seen signs and “crude omens”:

My clouded eyes have seen
The head of Medusa
Calm in sleep.
Not all dreams are lies.

(SN 68)

Sarton's vision of the sublime is founded on the experience she depicts in “Of the Muse.” (HS 61)

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.

(HS 61)

This “breaking open” unites self and nature, reality and imagination. The light comes and, naturally, goes, and in Sarton's vision is her joy. In “Salt Lick” this new freedom allows her to perceive her words as a dissolving salt, as she once perceived her psyche in the earlier poem “In Time Like Air.” The readers who journey to talk with her mistake her personhood for the poem, like deer coming to a salt lick:

The salt, a mystery,
The written word,
Not me.

(SN 23)

Their confusion is the reverse of the deer, who cannot realize that it is she who is being used to fill their need for the salt lick. The poet perceives both her natural mortality and the immortality of poetry, with a witty aside to the traveling readers who cannot know her simply through the poem and wear her out with visits to “lick and lick.”

On some cold winter day
I shall be licked away
Through no deer's fault,
There will be no more salt.

(SN 23)

Sarton's achievement in such late poems as “The Silence Now,” “The Cosset Lamb,” “Absence,” or “New Year Resolve,” manifests a psychological strength and maturity as well as a superb aesthetic accomplishment. In “Letters from Maine” she celebrates the mystery of human love, whether lost or found.

Let the muse bury the dead. For that she came.
Who walks the earth in joy and poverty?
Who then has risen? The tomb is empty.

(LM 27)

It is the spirit of Sarton's poetry that is alive for us and continuing. It is difficult to imagine a more humanistic vision for poetry.

Works Cited

Bennett, Paula, My Life a Loaded Gun. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1990.

Bloom, Harold. Poetry and Repression. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1976.

Derrida, Jacques. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” New Literary History 6.1 (1974), 5-75.

DeShazer, Mary K. Inspiring Women: Reimagining the Muse. Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon, 1986.

Diehl, Joanne Feit. Women Poets and the American Sublime. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Drake, William. The First Wave: Women Poets in America 1915-1945. New York: Macmillan, 1987.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Writings. Ed. William Gilman. New York: New American Library, 1965.

Homans, Margaret. The Woman Writer and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson. Princeton: Princeton UP.

Lipking, Lawrence. The Life of the Poet. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.

Sarton, May. At Seventy. New York: Norton, 1984.

———. Collected Poems (1930-73). New York: Norton, 1974.

———. Halfway to Silence. New York: Norton, 1980.

———. The House by the Sea. New York: Norton, 1977.

———. Letters from Maine: New Poems. New York: Norton, 1984.

———. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. New York: Norton, 1965.

———. Recovering. New York: Norton, 1984.

———. The Silence Now: New and Uncollected Earlier Poems. New York: Norton, 1988.

———. A World of Light. New York: Norton, 1976.