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    A Durable Fire: Poems
    A Durable Fire: Poems
    A Durable Fire: Poems
    Ebook104 pages41 minutes

    A Durable Fire: Poems

    By May Sarton

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    About this ebook

    Poetic meditations on solitude by acclaimed author May Sarton
    This collection borrows its title from Sir Walter Raleigh, who wrote, “Love is a durable fire / In the mind ever burning.” It is a fitting sentiment for a collection on solitude, wherein the author finds herself full of emotion even in seclusion. The first poem, “Gestalt at Sixty,” finds the author reflecting on the joy and loneliness of being solitary. A Durable Fire is a transformative work by a masterful poet.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMar 25, 2014
    ISBN9781480474352
    A Durable Fire: Poems
    Author

    May Sarton

    May Sarton (1912–1995) was born on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. Her novels A Shower of Summer Days, The Birth of a Grandfather, and Faithful Are the Wounds, as well as her poetry collection In Time Like Air, all received nominations for the National Book Award. An accomplished memoirist, Sarton came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton spent her later years in York, Maine, living and writing by the sea. In her last memoir, Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992), she shares her own personal thoughts on getting older. Her final poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994. Sarton died on July 16, 1995, in York, Maine.

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      Book preview

      A Durable Fire - May Sarton

      A Durable Fire

      Poems

      May Sarton

      Some of these poems have appeared in the following journals:

      Contempora, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Lyric, Poetry,

      Red Clay Reader, Pennsylvania Review, The Small Pond, Yankee.

      FOR

      Marynia F. Farnham

      Contents

      Publisher’s Note

      Gestalt at Sixty

      Part One

      Myself to Me

      Dear Solid Earth

      The Return of Aphrodite

      Inner Space

      Things Seen

      Mozart Again

      May Walk

      The Tree Peony

      A Chinese Landscape

      The Gifted

      Reeds and Water

      Moth in the Schoolroom

      The Snow Light

      Warning

      Surfers

      All Day I Was with Trees

      A Storm of Angels

      The Angels and the Furies

      The Country of Silence

      After an Island

      Fulfillment

      Part Two: The Autumn Sonnets

      Under the leaves an infant love lies dead

      If I can let you go as trees let go

      I wake to gentle mist over the meadow

      I never thought that it could be, not once

      After a night of rain the brilliant screen

      As if the house were dying or already dead

      Twice I have set my heart upon a sharing

      I ponder it again and know for sure

      This was our testing year after the first

      We watched the waterfalls, rich and baroque

      For steadfast flame wood must be seasoned

      Part Three

      February Days

      Note to a Photographer

      March in New England

      The Garden of Childhood

      Composition

      Autumn Again

      Winter Carol

      Part Four

      Burial

      Of Grief

      Prisoner at a Desk

      Birthday Present

      Elegy for Louise Bogan

      Part Five: Letters to a Psychiatrist

      Christmas Letter, 1970

      The Fear of Angels

      The Action of Therapy

      I Speak of Change

      Easter, 1971

      The Contemplation of Wisdom

      A Biography of May Sarton

      Publisher’s Note

      Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

      But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page. Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?

      In a printed book, the width

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