(1912–1995)
U.S. poet, novelist, and memoirist
May Sarton
The ash has lost its leaves and when I went out to get the mail and stopped to look up at it, I rejoiced to think that soon everything here will be honed down to structure. It is all a rich farewell now to leaves, to color. I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.
Journal of a Solitude (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), 34.
Be of good hope. Try to think in terms of “the long run” and store up your honey like the bees.
July 18, 1954 letter to Madeleine L’Engle, in May Sarton: Selected Letters 1916–1954, ed. by Susan Sherman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 349.
For the first time in my life I see that I have grown an inch and I believe that I may in ten years be a poet. It is wonderful.
January 15, 1939 letter to Virginia Woolf, in May Sarton: Selected Letters 1916–1954 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 150.
Willem de Kooning one day was shown some drawings, did not know who had done them, looked at them quite carefully, and said, “Well, they’re very interesting. They remind me a little bit of Japanese calligraphy, quite sophisticated. I don’t think they were done by a child.” And the person who gave them to him to look at said, “No, they were done by an elephant, sir.” Nothing has delighted me more for a long time. Siri was an elephant in a zoo who was seen making drawings with her trunk in the dust, and her keeper said, “Well, we must give her a chance to draw.” But the head of the zoo thought he was crazy and would not do anything about it, so the keeper on his own bought charcoal and large sheets of paper and laid them at Siri’s feet. Lo and behold, she went at it at once with her long sensitive trunk and would concentrate for as much as an hour in perfect bliss.
May Sarton, entry dated Tuesday, November 5, 1991, in Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), 156–57.
One day when I got home at Fourteen Wright Street, Judy opened the door and looked so stricken that I said, “Judy, what’s happened? Has Tom Jones died?” That was our cat. She said, “No, but Volta Hall has had a heart attack and died.” I suppose this is one of the most terrifying blows life has to offer: when your psychiatrist disappears. Within the next two days I wrote an elegy for Volta Hall which is in the Collected Poems and in which the repeated line is, “Now the long lucid listening is done.” I sent this to his widow with a bunch of violets. There was no reply. I thought perhaps there is an unwritten rule that the wife of a psychiatrist does not make contact with a patient even after he himself has died. So I thought no more about it. About ten years later I had a note from her asking if she could come to see me. She came and told me that I would never know what that poem had meant, that she could give it to her children so they could see what her husband and their father had been for so many patients and what he was in himself. She also came—and this touched me deeply—to ask my blessing on her remarriage, as though I was speaking, in a way, for Volta. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘that’s what he would want.’
You never know, when you send out a bird with an olive branch in its beak, whether it will come back or not.
Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), 130–31.
Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
Journal of a Solitude (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), 34.
Let it all begin once more, the step-by-step joyful effort to lift a poem out.
The House by the Sea (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 49.
All the way down through the moonlight beside the river I was literally attacked by so many poems that I felt like a juggler, terrified that I couldn’t keep them all going long enough at least to jot down a note. When I arrived, I made a dash for the typewriter, coat still on and typed like automatic writing for half an hour.
Letter to Louise Bogan, in May Sarton: Selected Letters 1955–1995 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), 37.
Ordering seeds is my reward for finishing the income-tax figures.
Journal of a Solitude (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), 84.
Found three huge mushrooms when I went out before breakfast to fill the bird feeder. So far only jays come, but the word will get around.
Journal of a Solitude (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), 37.
The most hopeful sign, the only one, in these hard times is how much individual initiative manages to make its way up through the asphalt, so many tough shoots of human imagination.
Journal of a Solitude (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973), 18.