Halfway to Silence Read online

  Halfway to Silence

  Poems

  May Sarton

  Contents

  Publisher’s Note

  Airs above the ground

  I

  After All These Years

  Two Songs

  The Oriole

  Old Trees

  A Voice

  The Balcony

  The Myths Return

  Time for Rich Silence

  Three Things

  The Lady of the Lake

  First Autumn

  Mal du Départ

  II

  Jealousy

  Control

  Along a Brook

  Beggar, Queen, and Ghost

  The Country of Pain

  Out of Touch

  At The Black Rock

  III

  The Turning of the Wind

  After the Storm

  Love

  Of Molluscs

  June Wind

  The Summer Tree

  Late Autumn

  The Geese

  Autumn Sonnets

  Pruning the Orchard

  Old Lovers at the Ballet

  IV

  On Sark

  In Suffolk

  A Winter Notebook

  Of the Muse

  Index

  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 of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.

  But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.

  Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s “Disclaimer” as it appears in two different type sizes.

  Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of “Disclaimer,” you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading “Disclaimer” on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead” is a complete line, while the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn” is not.

  Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.

  Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.

  Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to feel assured that the way the lines appear on the screen is an accurate embodiment of the way the author wants the lines to sound. Ever since poems began to be written down, the manner in which they ought to be written down has seemed equivocal; ambiguities have always resulted. By taking advantage of the technologies available in our time, our goal is to deliver the most satisfying reading experience possible.

  Halfway to Silence

  I was halfway to silence

  Halfway to land’s end

  When I heard your voice.

  Shall I take you with me?

  Shall we go together

  All the way to silence,

  All the way to land’s end?

  Is there a choice?

  Airs Above the Ground

  (Lippizan horse in Central Park)

  The white horse floats above the field,

  Pegasus in a child’s dream by Chagall

  Where gravity itself is forced to yield—

  Oh marvelous beast who cannot ever fall!

  The horse might have been sculpted flying there;

  The muscles look engraved, taut flowing powers;

  A furious gallop arrested in mid-air

  Towers over the city’s distant towers—

  So wild and beautiful we have to laugh,

  We have to weep. What is this caracole

  That moves us with the strangeness of great art?

  Dressage, control create a miracle.

&nb
sp; Taught through the ages first to terrify,

  To make foot soldiers turn their backs and scream

  Before a stallion turned loose in the sky,

  And now to bring us back to a lost dream—

  What is released by concentrated hours,

  The long dressage to catch a chancy rhyme,

  And craft that may sometimes harness strange powers,

  Those airs above the ground that banish time.

  After All These Years

  After all these years

  When all I could caress

  Was dog head and dog ears

  When all that came to bless

  Was cat with her loud purrs,

  With what joy and what quake

  I kiss small naked ears

  And stroke a marble cheek,

  After all these years

  Let sleeping beauty wake.

  Two Songs

  1

  Give me a love

  That has never been,

  Deeper than thought.

  Bring earth alive,

  The desert green

  After long drought.

  In the flesh, leaf,

  In the bones, root,

  The gardener’s hand

  Untangles grief,

  Invents a land.

  2

  What other lover

  Could ever displace

  Despair with all-heal,

  Or help me uncover

  Sweet herb-of-grace

  In the desolate field?

  None had your face—

  So pure in its poise,

  So closed in its power,

  That disciplined place

  Where the tragic joys

  Flower and re-flower.

  The Oriole

  When maples wear their aureole

  Of gauzy green,

  Then, only once, I heard the oriole

  But rarely seen.

  So it was when I found a home

  After long unrest,

  So it is once more now love has come

  To hold me fast.

  At the top of the great oak

  As I said your name,

  We saw him. He was there. He spoke.

  The bird of flame.

  Old Trees

  Old trees—

  How exquisite the white blossom

  On the gnarled branch!

  Thickened trunk, erratic shape

  Battered by winter winds,

  Bent in the long cold.

  Young ones may please

  The aesthete,

  But old trees—

  The miracle of their flowering

  Against such odds—

  Bring healing.

  Let us praise them,

  And sing hosannahs

  As the small buds grow red

  Just before they open.

  A Voice

  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.

  Seductive sound, mysterious chord

  That speaks its message in the very timbre

  And not in a to be deciphered word

  That I might hunt down or remember.

  It wanders through my dreams and there I learn

  I have to make the journey, have to go,

  Whatever I must change or overturn

  To reach the source, so strong this undertow.

  Like a tapped glass the shivered air

  Echoes and echoes a single poignant note.

  That voice, where does it live? I must go there,

  Comfort, entreat, and bless the magic throat.

  The Balcony

  after Baudelaire

  Lover of silence, muse of the mysteries,

  You will remember how we supped each night

  There on your balcony high in the trees

  Where a heraldic lion took late light,

  Lover of silence, muse of the mysteries.

  The big dogs slumbered near us like good bears;

  The old cat begged a morsel from my plate,

  And all around leaves stirred in the warm airs

  Breathed from the valley as the red sun set.

  The big dogs slumbered near us like good bears.

  I thought of all the pain and how we met

  Late in our lives yet lavishly at ease,

  Having assumed an end to old regret

  In the eternal present of the trees—

  I thought of all the pain and how we met.

  There every night we drank deep of the wine

  And of our love, still without history,

  Yet the completion of some real design

  Earned with much thought, muse of the mystery.

  There every night we drank deep of the wine.

  While out of deprivation a huge flower,

  The evening’s passion, was about to bloom.

  Such intimacy held us in its power

  The long years vanished in a little room,

  And out of deprivation, a huge flower.

  The Myths Return

  Now in this armature

  Where the tide rose and rose

  Till every crack was filled,

  Long echoes still

  Reverberate in the hollow cave,

  And the walls tremble.

  Poseidon

  Catching a dolphin

  Must have laughed in his fierce joy.

  Eons ago

  Sacred and creaturely married,

  And still those great tides ebb and flow—

  As we now know.

  Time for Rich Silence

  Time for rich silence,

  The passionate season,

  For the present tense

  Beyond speech, outside reason.

  Time now to explore

  These intricate cages,

  Two bodies aware,

  Two equipages.

  Find the way to unlock

  A mysterious door

  At the threshold of shock

  With the impact of war.

  Then gentle fierce joys

  On the wave’s rising curve

  Till it reaches it poise,

  Tumbles, touches the nerve.

  And all tumult is done—

  Two equipages

  In silent communion

  Released from their cages.

  Three Things

  I carried two things around in my mind

  Walking the woods and thinking how to say

  Shiver of poplar leaves in a light wind,

  Threshing of water over tumbled stones,

  A brook rippling its interrupted way—

  Two things that bring a tremor to the bones.

  And now I carry around in my head a third.

  The force of it stops me as I walk the wood,

  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.

  The Lady of the Lake

  Somewhere at the bottom of the lake she is

  Entangled among weeds, her deep self drowned.

  I cannot be with her there. I know she is bound

  To a dead man. Her wide open eyes are his.

  Only a part of her surfaces in my arms

  When I can lift her up and float her there

  Gently to breathe life-giving natural air,

  Wind in the leaves, the bright summer’s charms.

  For I know I can be hers, hers for a while

  But she can never be mine for a year or a day,

  Long ago married, her deep self given away,

  Though she turns to me sometimes with a luminous smile.

  But what I cannot have or cannot keep

  Draws me down under the waters, and I come

  With h
im, with her, into a strange communion,

  And all is well where the drowned lovers sleep.

  First Autumn

  What do the trees in the window have to tell

  The lovers wrapped in their strange grief,

  The lovers wrapped in their strange delight?

  What do they hear in the rain, caught in its spell?