[In the following essay, Pobo discusses the regenerative properties of lightness and silence in Sarton's poetry.]

E. M. Forster's famous epigraph at the beginning of Howard's End—“only connect”—could serve as an epigraph to many of May Sarton's poems. Sarton is eighty and has published three books of poetry during the last twelve years. These three books strongly connect to her earlier works; however, they also show a poet continuously challenged by the discipline of verse itself, by the way the line shapes rhythm, by sound (as the Maine shoreline is revised by the endless push of the cold water), and by imagery.

The dance of silence and light comes to mind when we consider Sarton's later work. Silence and light are closely related throughout the body of her work, and in the later poems they are inextricably linked. Although both are difficult terms, abstractions, Sarton does not leave them to dampen in such a cerebral place. Instead, she gives them color, winds them up, and invites us to smell them as we would the shirley poppies in her poem of the same name.

Light has always been a crucial image for poets. Revelation is light's “goal,” what light must do. Nevertheless, even in the light most of us miss much. We see selectively. Sarton's poems give the focus that we would probably miss. The “small” detail of a Christmas tree observed by one human being suddenly becomes an intersection of silence and light in “Christmas Light.” Here the speaker is alone with the Christmas tree. In the silence that tree and speaker share, the speaker says she is “reborn again.” As she enjoys the solitude (“When everyone had gone”), she finds that “the garland of pure light / Stayed on, stayed on” (The Silence Now [hereafter cited as SN] 27). The purity of the light sharpens the revelatory nature of the moment. That the light stays on suggests its eternal quality, something from which the speaker will continue to take hope.

Moreover, that this light “stayed on” is an evocative image, a small sun in her home, a life-sustaining force. Sarton writes often in both her poems and in her journals about her garden; in the garden the colors of silence blend with those of light. A gardener knows how important it is to make good use of the light—the time for work, the latch against chaos. Because the light does not always stay on, we feel all the more illuminated by it when it does. We revel in it. Those isolated moments when the light remains with us become defining. They are roadmaps into those deepest and most inaccessible parts of ourselves. This poem ends not only with the sense of revelation but also with a triumphant gratitude so much in evidence in Sarton's poetry. In “Winter Night” from As Does New Hampshire, Sarton's poetry collection from 1967, even night has a “radiance” (18). Darkness must bring forth light.

Light not only reveals; it highlights the shades and subtleties in nature, in our lives. In “Autumn Sonnets,” the speaker questions why we call autumn “fall,” a season of “elevation” through its changes and an “ascent / From dawn to dawn.” The poem celebrates this paradox; fall doesn't fall so much as we rise up to meet it. She sees “skies more huge and luminous at dusk, / Till we are strained by light and still more light” (Halfway to Silence [hereafter cited as HS] 49). The paradox of one twenty-four-hour period that includes both a night and a day matches the paradox of a single year in which opposites connect and require each other—winter needs summer, fall, spring.

We live (“strain”) within those opposites. We are attracted to them, and they help us to discover our own life rhythms and patterns. In the second sonnet in “Autumn Sonnets” the earth itself reveals paradox. The speaker notices that her “gentle earth is barren now, or nearly” (HS 49). Earth itself is “strained” in the light of its own changes. What is “gentle” in the garden—the tender shoot, the seed nudging the soil apart so it can enter the light—fades, as daylight fades, as seasons fade.

Autumn's colors become barren ground. We know, as the speaker knows in autumn, that “the worst is still to come.” To endure the sharpening days of late autumn and the harsh settling in of winter, we must learn how to “Withstand, endure.” The speaker says she contains “love as if it were a warhead.” Love is anything but taciturn here. As earth hugs the underground warhead, enclosing it from the elements and winter's bite, so the speaker must have love in the deepest part of herself, far from the cold that threatens to stretch and deepen in the coming months. The speaker compares herself with a wild fox that “burns his brightness for mere food or bed.” Only this brightness can save the fox in the fierce winter.

The warhead image startles and awakens. One remembers George Herbert, a favorite poet of Sarton's, or Donne—in Sarton's work we often find the kind of illumination resulting from the juxtaposition of dissimilar images. In this odd fusing together, we are once again “strained by light,” by paradox itself. “Strain” also suggests a pouring of a liquid substance through some kind of filter; we are the liquid and we are refined by the light.

Light heightens our awareness of the landscape and of those things nearest to us which we often ignore. Light can be, for a poet or any creative artist, a strong connection with the muse. Sarton has often referred in her journals to her necessity of having a muse. She claims that for her the muse is always a woman. “I am glad of her / As one is glad of the light” sings the poet (HS 61). This gladness, this gratitude, is a light Sarton gives her reader as she celebrates it herself—the gift is also the giver. To be “glad” of this kind of light is to be glad of creativity, of words that demand a place on the page.

Sarton consistently uses diction that reflects a grounding in Christian metaphor. Her “rejoice” and her phrasing, which often sounds biblical, are central to her poetic expression—not as the missionary but as the humanist, the observer and enjoyer of the light. Still, if light is not an explicitly “Christian” image, it is nonetheless a humanistic image. The New Testament suggests that “the Word” and light are synonymous in the figure of Christ. In Sarton's poetry, light and word meet in song. Rhythm becomes revelation.

Sarton's claims that she is not a Christian are not inconsistent with her world view, which emerges from her poetry and journals. She wants the widest possible scope, the lens through which the light gets the widest exposure. Yet she is hardly antireligious; she celebrates the paths on which a religion, as opposed to dogma, can take any individual. Religion is not the “bad guy” as much as it is a path many travel without a knowledge of the rocks. Stumbling is the human way.

Sarton is more than aware of those who would interpret her vision as flawed, as unfortunate, as if to suggest that if she were only straight, how great she'd be. Yet as the work of her last three poetry books suggests, she is able to affect both gay and straight readers. She gives no apologies for her life, for her spirit. These volumes suggest a poet who is at ease with her history. The muse is not merely a sexual light; the muse is female, is nurture, is the intersection where silence and light meet in the imagination, expanding the poems beyond Nelson or York and into those distant places where many live—she becomes as much a resident of Butte, Montana, as she is a resident of Maine. The poet is a resident of a particular location, but she also resides in the imagination, the birthplace of her poems. The poet journeys out alone, in silence, into unmapped places. Silence is the poet's natural condition; what breaks this silence can lead to the creation of a new poem. In “The Geese” the speaker runs to see some geese after hearing them honk; the geese break the silence.

Although the nurturing muse sheds light on the poet, connecting the poet with the necessary imagery to create this female center is difficult and can unexpectedly leave the poet—as light can fade.

In At Seventy, Sarton expresses gratitude for a particular muse—and her awareness of how quickly that muse can remove itself. The muse is a form of light; the poet writes not so much under its spell as under its illumination, as the moon illumines our path in the dark. The muse is a giver—and poetry for Sarton is a great gift—and the poet must receive the gift and respond in gratitude. This gratitude is the poem itself, which restores order. In “Letters from Maine,” the speaker considers “The long silence of winter when I shall / Make poems out of nothing, out of loss” (Letters from Maine [hereafter cited as LM] 18). During the act of writing, the poet meets the muse; the exchange of gifts becomes complete. And that gift, ultimately, is given to the readers.

This kind of gift can often occur only through some sort of poise between tensions. Sarton says:

… I jotted down some of the tensions I experience in the process of writing a poem, tensions which discharge a load of experience in a most beneficent and exciting way when the piece of weaving on the loom turns out to be a real poem:

1) The tension between past and present,

2) between idea and image,

3) between music and meaning,

4) between particular and universal,

5) between creator and critic,

6) between silence and words.

(Writings on Writing [hereafter cited as WW] 7)

The word “between” acts to create a litany, a credo that suggests where the muse appears—between poet and page, between writer and reader. Her last “between” is that of silence and words. This, too, is a paradox. As silence takes shape, words are born; as words are born, they lead us back into silence. The silence changes and it is a place we seek more so than a destination. Sarton's book titles suggest as much: Halfway to Silence, The Silence Now.

This silence is light and solitude, for only in solitude can we ready ourselves for what the light may reveal. Reading itself is usually a solitary experience. In her poem “On Sark” the speaker says in stanza 3: “Islands are for people who are islands, / Who have always detached from the main / For a purpose, or because they crave / The free within the framed as poets do” (HS 55). Poets crave “the free within”—perhaps readers, or at least those readers who are somehow “detached from the main,” crave this same freedom. As the poem gives the a frame, (a sonnet, rhymed quatrains) the poet has the necessary structure in which she can fully explore her own imagination, to find connections between images.

In “For Monet” the opening line is “Poets, too, are crazed by light” (LM 37). Like Monet, who investigated crannies of light and shade, the poet tries “To hold the fleeting still / In a design—.” The poem's conclusion suggests that Monet “spent a lifetime / Trying to undazzle the light / And pin it down.” Poets do the same—but they have no pins, only words, and words are great escape artists. “Trying” is a key word here; there are no guarantees that, even with his enormous gifts, Monet really could “undazzle the light / And pin it down.” This “trying” is the poet's quest too—the light is larger than anyone's command of language. Language shakes and cracks along the edges, the way light fades at dusk on a water lily. However, in the trying comes the creation, the joining of creativity and vision.

While light is a central element of Sarton's later work, an image that persists from her earliest poems, loss of light is also a compelling metaphor. One of the most poignant poems in Letters from Maine is “Mourning to Do.” In this expressive and personal poem, the speaker mourns over the loss of “Judy” who was “For years lost in the darkness of her mind.” The speaker says that she herself “cannot fathom that darkness” (LM 48). Light, then, has limitations; some places are so dark and sturdy that no light can break through—we cannot “fathom” such a darkness. The speaker says she is “Alone here in the lovely silent house.” The silence, which is usually lovely, now becomes a place of grief: “Judy is gone forever” (LM 48).

Just as the muse does not always stay, although the poem given by the muse remains, light, too, can be ephemeral. “Mourning to Do” ends with an image of light, perhaps suggesting that light can somehow ultimately survive even the most intense darkness: “Happy the dawn of memory and the sunrise.” The cycles of night and day mirror our own here—the night of mourning is followed by dawn. Memory becomes a place of light, a place where the mourner can go for healing.

Memory is also often a painful place; to become healed often requires pain, a facing of the loss. In The Silence Now Sarton's poem “The Muse as Donkey” claims that “Illumination costs” (68).

The poem echoes one of her most charming tales, The Poet and the Donkey, from 1969. In that tale, an older poet named Andy recovers his muse through taking care of a donkey (Whiffenpoof) who usually resides on a local farm. Andy finds his own stubbornness (and tenacity) in the donkey's. Andy's last name is Lightfoot. At the end the narrator calls him “a boy”—the donkey has restored the youthful wonder necessary for creation, has renewed “the old man,” who comes to understand why this donkey is necessary for his own spiritual journey and his writing. He thinks to himself, “who wants to live outside pain, outside joy?” (The Poet and the Donkey hereafter cited as P&D 126). In “The Muse as Donkey,” the speaker says she has “grown a third ear / Listening / Keeping the silence alive” (SN 68).

That connection between pain and joy is also evident in “The Muse as Donkey.” The poem's resolution comes when the speaker says, “Unable to heal myself, / I shall spend the summer / Healing the donkey. …” Later the speaker says that “Mystery itself is fulfillment” (SN 70). Perhaps light can only brighten after we spend time in the darkness, especially that of mourning. Then the muse can come to the poet as both comfort and spur. Light needs darkness as poet needs donkey: “We are fellow sufferers / And we do not despair” (SN 70). The donkey suffers from frail ankles; the poet from a loss of creative spark.

The last poem in The Silence Now, “The Phoenix Again,” is central to all of Sarton's poetry. Here the paradoxes she has worked with throughout her career are not resolved or explained; rather, they are put in the perspective of the bird that will not die, the bird that will not decline into darkness only. Fire (light) brings the bird back. The phoenix itself is an image we can trust; she will “take flight / Over the seas of grief” (SN 76).

This rebirthing process, this refining and re-seeing of light, is both the struggle of the individual and that of the poet. The muse must leave the poet in darkness to allow the poems a chance to be born. The poet, like the phoenix, is looking for that which does not die, something stronger than the bone cage in which we live. This transcends aging and the inevitable confrontation with death: “For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die” (SN 76).

The poem survives her creator, flies to a place where the muse may be surprised by what it reveals in a light that is both words and wordless. The reader must bring a silence to the poem to see the bird resurrect. The bird rises because it can sing “her thrilling song.” We are the phoenix and we are reborn in the experience of reading the poem; our lives gather clarity, light, sound, as we contemplate (preferably in solitude as Sarton's journals and poems suggest) the bird that must fall in order to survive.

These three books of May Sarton's later years are phoenixes; each shows a spirit that has gone down into darkness, so that it can rise again and fly into light. As the poet, once again, rediscovers her wings, we soar with her. We “only connect” as light keeps a step ahead of darkness. We walk in its trail; an iridescent shirley poppy gives us courage. Petals require of us our eyes. The silent flower opens as “an explosion, / And so silent!” (SN 18).

Of these three books, The Silence Now (the latest) is in some ways the one most connected with Sarton's past work. The third section is called “Earlier Poems,” and the style is often more formal than the rest of the collection. Still, these poems prepare us for our climb with the phoenix. In “Over Troubled Water” the speaker says that “The poet dances on a rope held taut / Between reality and his desire” (SN 56). Reality and desire resemble each other as the dance continues.

In the following poem, “The Muse as Donkey,” the poet examines those sources from which inspiration, suddenly and often inexplicably, appears. There too “reality” is no more or no less a darkness than desire. The poet “wants” to create; the reality is a painful aridity that, thankfully, a donkey ends.

About writing poetry, Sarton says,

Poetry is a dangerous profession because it demands a very delicate and exhausting balance between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal—and these balances are shifting all the time.

(WW 69)

Danger. This is what the phoenix learns—and what the bird can help us to survive. “The balances” Sarton suggests are those of day and night, light and darkness—they shift all the time, as do our feelings and fears. Moreover, “the balances” between silence and sound keep shifting. Silence prepares us for the spoken word. In this balancing act we live, and here poetry, especially Sarton's, says “I'm here!”

Works Cited

Sarton, May. As Does New Hampshire. Dublin, N.H.: William L. Bauhan, 1967.

———. At Seventy. New York: Norton, 1984.

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

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

———. The Poet and the Donkey. 1969. New York: Norton, 1984.

———. The Silence Now. 1988. New York: Norton, 1990.

———. Writings on Writing. Orono, Maine: Puckerbrush Press, 1980.