May Sarton

I've become quite enamoured with May Sarton lately. She was a prolific poet and writer of the middle twentieth century. Sensuous, vast, cruel, sojourning, sapphic, exacting, celebratory, mystic - long, sweeping, musical, synesthetic phrases. Reads like a prayer. One wonderful unitarian. It baffles me that her poetry doesn't have more of a presence on the web.

Here is a wonderful Harper Audio collection of May Sarton reading her own poems. For best quality, try the ".au" suffix files. Of these, I would recommend "The Olive Grove" and "The Lady and the Unicorn/Cluny Tapestries."

Here are two for the season:

FIRST SNOW

This is the first soft snow
That tiptoes up to your door
As you sit by the fire and sew,
That sifts through a crack in the floor
And covers your hair with hoar.
This is the stiffening wound
Burning the heart of a deer
Chased by a moon-white hound,
This is the hunt, and the queer
Sick beating of feet that fear.
This is the crisp despair
Lying close to the marrow,
Fallen out of the air
Like frost on the narrow
Bone of a shot sparrow.
This is the love that will seize
Savagely onto your mind
And do whatever he please,
This the despair, and a moon-blind
Hound you never bind.

(originally published in ENCOUNTERS IN APRIL, 1937)

Girl with a Cello

There had been no such music here
Until a girl came in from falling dark and snow
To bring into this house her glowing cello
As if some silent, magic animal

She sat, head bent
Her long hair all aspill over the breathing wood
And drew the bow

There had been no such music here
Until a girl came in from falling dark and snow
And she drew out that sound so like a whale
A rich, dark, suffering joy
As if to show all that a wrist holds and that fingers know
When they caress a magic animal
There had been no such music here
Until a girl came in from falling dark and snow