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    The Lion and the Rose: Poems
    The Lion and the Rose: Poems
    The Lion and the Rose: Poems
    Ebook113 pages50 minutes

    The Lion and the Rose: Poems

    By May Sarton

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    About this ebook

    May Sarton’s poetic celebrations of the American landscape
    Written in Santa Fe, New Mexico, May Sarton’s third collection of poems takes inspiration from the land, the light, and the palette of the American Southwest. With archaeological precision, Sarton uncovers American history and heredity. “Plain grandeur escapes definition,” begins one poem. But Sarton’s America is alive with history and is continually redefined by its own settings and mythology.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMar 25, 2014
    ISBN9781480474345
    The Lion and the Rose: 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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    • 4/5
      I don't have anything profound to say about Sarton's third book of poetry. A good decade has progressed since her first book of poetry, so there is obvious growth in her writing. The poems are becoming, at least in my opinion, more what she was to become known for in her later years.

    Book preview

    The Lion and the Rose - May Sarton

    THEME AND VARIATIONS:

    SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

    MEDITATION IN SUNLIGHT

    In space in time I sit

    Thousands of feet above

    The sea and meditate

    On solitude on love

    Near all is brown and poor

    Houses are made of earth

    Sun opens every door

    The city is a hearth

    Far all is blue and strange

    The sky looks down on snow

    And meets the mountain range

    Where time is light not shadow

    Time in the heart held still

    Space as the household god

    And joy instead of will

    Knows love as solitude

    Knows solitude as love

    Knows time as light not shadow

    Thousands of feet above

    The sea where I am now

    Who wear an envelope

    Of crystal air and learn

    That space is also hope

    Where sky and snow both burn

    Where spring is love not weather

    And I happy alone

    The place the time together

    The sun upon the stone.

    DIFFICULT SCENE

    This landscape does not speak,

    Exists, is simply there.

    Take it or leave it; the weak

    Suffer from fierce air.

    For these high desolate

    Lands where earth is skeleton

    Make no demands; they state.

    Who can resist the stone?

    Implacable tranquility

    That searches out the naked heart,

    Touches the quick of anxiety

    And breaks the world apart.

    The angel in the flaming air

    Is everywhere and no escape,

    Asking of life that it be pure

    And given as the austere landscape.

    And most accompanied when alone;

    Most sensitive when mastered sense;

    Alive most when the will is gone,

    Absence become the greatest Presence.

    The golden landscape cannot save,

    It only asks your right to be

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