The Lion and the Rose

Poems

May Sarton

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781480474345
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

AMERICAN LANDSCAPES

WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA

All day I had seen a nearer dot on the map, this town,

A night’s sleep and the end of speeding and climbing

The steep magnificent hills, a way of coming home.

It is a still town where the past lies dreaming.

Drenched in the old sun, washed in the gold light,

Orderly and gay with white sills gleaming

And brick that glows by day and frames the night.

It is a warm town where the past is living.

The ancient walls draw comfort from the ancient trees.

Their roots are bound together in the earth and breathing.

They wear their double beauty with a marvelous ease.

It is a deep town where the past is sleeping,

And in the silence on the sills the soldiers’ spurs

Are stilled and all the shouting and the women weeping

As the town is taken and lost in those unburied wars.

It is a strange town where the past is breathing.

For nothing is lost that has happened, nothing is over.

The traveller walking dark streets is silently leaving

His step beside Stonewall Jackson’s like a lover—

For all foresees him here and he remembers all and knows

That from this past the future rises streaming,

And from this town relationship is born and flows.

It is a good town where the past is growing

Into the whole stretch of the land and touches all

With warmth about the heart and gives a form to living,

A still town where the stranger listens to his footsteps fall.

MONTICELLO

This legendary house, this dear enchanted tomb,

Once so supremely lived in and for life designed,

Will none of mouldy death nor give it room,

Charged with the presence of a living mind.

Enter and touch the temper of a lively man.

See, it is spacious, intimate and full of light.

The eye, pleased by detail, is nourished by the plan;

Nothing is here for show, much for delight.

All the joy of invention and of craft and wit

Are freely granted here, all given rein,

But taut within the classic form and ruled by it,

Elegant, various, magnificent—and plain,

Europe become implacably American!

But Mozart still could have been happy here,

And Monroe riding from his farm again,

As well as any silversmith or carpenter—

As well as we, for whom this elegance,

This freedom in a form, this peaceful grace

Is not our heritage, although it happened once:

We read the future, not the past, upon his face.

The time must come when, from the people’s heart,

Government grows to meet the stature of a man,

And freedom finds its form, that great unruly art,

And the state is a house designed by Jefferson.

IN DEEP CONCERN

Guilford College, North Carolina

Quakers define the hour when thoughts begin to burn,

And faith leaps from the heart into the hands,

That great turbulence of spirit, “a concern”,

The hour when contemplation breaks its bonds.

Poems are written, colleges are built, states live

When people go out from their thinking to the street

With a faith in their hands so deep and positive

It makes the vision truth. Here thought and action meet.

So the idea of a college, a hundred years ago,

Was born from Quakers’ deep concern, and with their hands

They dug and baked clay into bricks that warmly glow

Still with the heat of faith. That college stands.

But still we, later, are not sure. We are bound fast.

We do not know for certain. We have not got it clear:

Paul Revere rode, and Franklin went to France, John Brown

Was hanged because thought burned to action in the past,

Because thought grew so deep and hot it cast out fear.

And it is matter for concern whether we shall go down,

Or from the deeps of thought and prayer take up our stand

Where faith moves from the mind into the working hand.

CHARLESTON PLANTATIONS

You cannot see them from the road: go far and deep,

Down the long avenues where mosses cover up the leaves,

Across the empty terraced lawns neglected and asleep,

To the still place where no dog barks and no dove grieves,

And a black mirror gives you back your face too white

In pools dyed jet by cypress roots: go deep and far,

Deep into time, far into crumbling spaces and half-light

To where they stand, our Egypt and our Nineveh.

Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters’ houses.

The garlands and the little foxes’ faces carved

Upon the mantels look on empty walls and water-stains

And the stairs tremble though so elegantly curved,

(Outside are waiting the bright creeping vines)

And as your foot falls in the silences, you guess

Decay has been arrested for a moment in the wall

But the grey plumes upon the trees in deathly loveliness

Will stir when you have passed, and somewhere a stone fall.

Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters’ houses.

There is no rice now and the world that sprang from it

Like an azalea, brilliant from the swamps, has crumbled.

A single century, it is embalmed as Egypt,

A single century, and all that elegance was humbled—

While we who fired that world and watched it burn

Come eve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Publisher's Note
• I THEME AND VARIATIONS
• II AMERICAN LANDSCAPES
• III THE WORK OF HAPPINESS
• IV LOVE POEMS
• V TO THE LIVING
• VI CELEBRATIONS
• A Biography of May Sarton
• Copyright