Now I Become Myself
Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
"Hurry, you will be dead before--"
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
("Now I Become Myself" by May Sarton, from Collected Poems 1930-1993. © W.W. Norton, 1993.)
May Sarton (pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton) was born in Belgium, in 1912, and emigrated with her parents to escape the threat of German occupation. When May was only four years old, the Sarton family settled into Cambridge Massachusetts, with May being an only child.
Gifted with poetry, Sarton published several poems by the time she was 17. She graduated from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929. She started theater lessons in her late teens, but continued writing poetry, eventually publishing her first collection in 1937 entitled Encounter in April. Her family being well-connected, Sarton was a regular visitor to Europe, where she met Virginia Woolf and the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen.
Gifted with poetry, Sarton published several poems by the time she was 17. She graduated from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929. She started theater lessons in her late teens, but continued writing poetry, eventually publishing her first collection in 1937 entitled Encounter in April. Her family being well-connected, Sarton was a regular visitor to Europe, where she met Virginia Woolf and the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen.
Her father taught at Harvard, and became well known for being the definitive scholar on the history of science. From George Sarton she learned that people who are rooted in their work are rooted in life. He believed that “we have only what we are and we only have what we give, but on condition that we give all.” A tall order to live up to, and indeed she did.
Her mother was a teacher. One of the lessons she learned from her mother was to be aware of what every living thing around her needed, whether it was her plants, her cat, or a friend--and her mother showed the costs of rigorous love.
Over the course of her career, Sarton taught at several colleges and universities, including Harvard University, Bread Loaf, and Wellesley College.
May Sarton devoted her life to writing 50 books of poetry, novels, journals and children’s stories. Of her work she once said: “Luckily for me my work is an intense joy as well as a necessity for me. I believe in it, and even if I were not to publish another book, I would still do it because I would wish to—because it makes me feel fully alive.” And she hoped her writings would reach others who might be experiencing similar thoughts and feelings.
Although at first overlooked by literary critics, in the later part of her career reviewers and feminist academics began to discover Sarton's work, lauding her as an important contemporary American author.
May Sarton's best and most enduring work probably lies in her journals and memoirs, particularly Plant Dreaming Deep (about her early years at Nelson, 1958-68), Journal of a Solitude (1972-1973, often considered her best), The House by the Sea (1974-1976), Recovering (1978-1979) and At Seventy (1982-1983). In these fragile, rambling and honest accounts of her solitary life, Sarton deals with such issues as ageing, isolation, solitude, friendship, love and relationships.
In 1945, while on vacation in Sante Fe, Sarton met Judy Matlack, a professor of English at Simmons College, who became her lover and companion of thirteen years. The couple separated after the death of Sarton's father, when Sarton moved to Nelson, New Hampshire. She later relocated to York, Maine, where she spent the last twenty years of her life.
She took a great personal risk with one of her best-known works, "Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing" (1965), in which she tells her readers that she is a lesbian. This move did not diminish her popularity; later novels such as Kinds of Love (1970) scored well with the public. Sarton continued to build on her reputation as a memoirist with 1973's Journal of a Solitude, giving readers an inside look at her experiences as a female artist. The work earned accolades from critics and won her new fans.
Biographer George Bailin in May Sarton: Woman and Poet stated:
"Not only is May a poet,
not only does she write novels and journals,
but she
holds herself up for all to see, large, clear.
She examines her thinking in the
open,
so that one can see what a writer is,
what is being accomplished, why,
how.
This artist reveals herself fully,
and outlines the spirit of the times as
well."
Linda Barrett Osborne noted in the Washington Post Book World that
"in
whatever May Sarton writes
one can hear the human heart
pulsing just below the
surface."
Her Writing
(A) Structure of Time
May observed from her father that "we find our own self, not by pursuing one’s self, but rather by pursuing some project and learning through discipline and routine who one is and wants to be." May took this lesson into her life by structuring her days with routine and scheduling. She found a kind of sanctity in her use and structure of time.
May spent most of her adult life living alone, most notably in New Hampshire and Maine, places where she found the solitude that she required to listen deeply to what was moving in her soul.
She recognized in herself that there were seasons to her soul, times when she would need to be alone, and even then know that the times of her aloneness would, in turn, drive her to need relatedness.
She said:
"There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge
and to maintain balance within it a precarious business.
But I must not forget that,
for me, being with people or even with one beloved person
for any length of time without solitude is even worse.
I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces.
I must have time alone in which to mull over any encounter,
and to extract its juice, its essence,
to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it…."
Sarton's pilgrimage would be to travel inward and reflect on all that she found, the good and the not so desirable but real parts of herself. Robert Coles, the child psychologist/child faith development specialist would say that we are all indebted to May for her “willingness to give her specific fears and desires a chance to be of universal significance; to do that one must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so if expressed have a human value beyond the private.”
May found balance in the joy of gardening. Part of her daily routine was going out into the garden to cut flowers for her study. She inherited from her mother a love of flowers and nature; and so for her a house never stood alone; it always had the companion of a garden. Even those of us who never have found an addiction with the soil, know its hold upon others.
Sarton wrote:
"Making a garden is not a gentle hobby for the elderly,
to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire.
It is a grand passion.
It seizes a person whole, and once it has done so
he will have to accept that life is going to be radically changed."
(E) "Demons"
Sarton struggled with her own demons. She was not apart from the dark side of life. May talked about wickedness as an absolute reality, that each of us battles within ourselves. May suffered from bouts of depression and self-doubt throughout her life, during
which she questioned her talent and, on one occasion, almost gave up writing
altogether.
She had a reputation for being at times disagreeable, even destructive with her anger. It could pull her down and alienate people from her. So, she wrote in search of sources of strength.
She had a reputation for being at times disagreeable, even destructive with her anger. It could pull her down and alienate people from her. So, she wrote in search of sources of strength.
Of her "demons," she observed:
"I have to forgive myself to keep on creating
and being what I can be.
If I dwell too much on my lacks,
I simply must become useless to myself and others.
That they (demons) are immense and terribly destructive I need not be told,
but I believe truly that God has forgiven me a long time ago
because he knows what he has laid upon me
and that to remain as transparent and vulnerable as I must
and to go on creating forever, is all that he can ask."
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