May Sarton -- Silence and Solitude

When a woman feels alone, when the room
is full of daemons,” the Nootka tribe
Tells us, ‘The Old Woman will be there.”
She has come to me over three thousand miles
And what does she have to tell me, troubled
“by phantoms in the night”?
Is she really here?
What is the saving word from so deep in the past.
From as deep as the ancient root of the redwood,
From as deep as the primal bed of the ocean,
From as deep as a woman’s heart sprung open
Again through a hard birth or a hard death?
Here under the shock of love, I am open
To you, Primal spirit, one with rock and wave,
One with survivors of flood and fire,
Who have rebuilt their homes a million times,
Who have lost their children and borne them again.
The words I hear are strength, laughter, endurance.
Old Woman I meet you deep inside myself.
There in the rootbed of fertility,
World without end, as the legend tells it.
Under the words you are my silence.

– May Sarton, Poem in Letters From Maine

May Sarton (1912–1995), was a Belgian-born American poet, novelist, memoirist, autobiographer, children's author, screenwriter, and playwright. A prolific poet, Sarton often dwells in her works upon such concerns as the joy and pain of love, the necessity of solitude for creativity and identity, and the conflict between body and soul.

Sarton moved with her family to Ipswich, England following the outbreak of World War I when German troops invaded Belgium after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. One year later, they moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where her father George started working at Harvard University.

Sarton's family members found themselves immersed in the intellectual and bohemian circles of Cambridge. There, poetry beckoned young May. She started theater lessons in her late teens, but she continued writing poetry throughout her adolescence. She began publishing her poetry at the tender age of 17.

In all, Sarton wrote over 30 volumes of poetry and fiction and was best known for her letters and journals which chronicled her life in a small house along an isolated Maine coast, where she spent the last twenty years of her life.

Her often solitary life is reflected in a series of memoirs where Sarton talked about highly personal facets of her life including her lesbianism, the onset of age, and her constant self-doubts. She was also a keen observer of the natural world, taking great pleasure from the development of wild flowers as the seasons changed.

“A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself,” Sarton wrote. As a spiritual being, she was constantly battling with the challenges that she faced as a naturally creative person while often living in solitude.

Her love life was as prolific as her art. From Eve Le Gallienne to Julian (and Juliette) Huxley to Elizabeth Bowen to Muriel Rukeyser to a host of lesser knowns, Sarton left a passionate wake across two continents and never tried of chase and conquest. Spouses were deserted for her, lovers set adrift for her.

In her biography of May Sarton, Margot Peters states …

“Sarton's passion and talent lit fires in both sexes wherever she went. Attractive, audacious and bratty Sarton assumed she could have whatever - and whomever - she wanted.”

According to Peters, Sarton's hunger for love was driven by her need to conquer. The poet affirmed the desire for love that is sustained in late life.

“ … inside, the person I really am has no relation to this mask age is slowly attaching to my face. I feel so young, so exposed, under it. I simply cannot seem to learn to behave like the very old party I am. The young girl, arrogant, open, full of feelings she cannot analyze, longing to be told she is beautiful – that young girl lives inside this shell. And God knows, age is hard on her.”

– May Sarton, Kinds of Love

Sarton's feelings are never more raw or exposed than in Letters from Maine (1984). The rugged Eastern coast of her home provided a stark background for Sarton's images of a tragically brief and new-found love. In her writing, she described the willingness to give anything and devote everything to a new love, as well as dealing with the despair at the memory of what was left over.

“The value of solitude – one of its values – is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression. A few moments of desultoryconversation … may calm an inner storm. But the storm, painful as it is,might have had some truth in it. So sometimes one has simply to endurea period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can livethrough it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.”

– May Sarton

As Sarton grew older, time became an increasingly prominent factor in her life, but as Letters from Maine shows, it is never too late to love. These feelings are summed up perfectly in one of her poems which is called “When a Woman Feels Alone.”

In this poem, Sarton's allusion to the Old Woman of the Nootka tribe, an indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast in Canada, recognizes a tribal belief system that centers on a Creator being as well as spirits whose powers can be used to bring peace and fortune. The Nootka (Nuu-chah-nulth) believe that all life forms have a spirit, and should therefore be respected and appreciated.

When the woman in the poem feels alone, she seeks a primal source that will provide answers to her trouble and perhaps redeem the disturbing silences. The words of comfort from the Old Woman spirit – “strength, laughter, and endurance” – correspond respectively to the natural references of the trees, the oceans, and the woman's heart (images that appear in the poem prior to the woman's words).

In the last lines, the lonely woman acknowledges the enduring silence of her being:

"Old Woman I meet you deep inside myself.
There in the rootbed of fertility,
World without end, as the legend tells it.
Under the words you are my silence."

It is a poem of reflection and critical understanding. Like the mighty redwood, the woman finds comfort in silent existence throughout terrible tragedies such as “rebuilding a home” or “losing a child.” Sarton's verse visits the question of the difficult, necessary self-confrontations that solitude makes possible. It is the woman's natural passing deep inside herself at “the rootbed of her fertility.”

“Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”

– May Sarton

May Sarton had a stroke in 1990, and required a nurse. She could no longer garden, or walk with her cherished dog to the sea. But she still loved the coast of Maine, and her home, and, when she could, she continued to write. She dictated her final journals. She still drank champagne in the afternoon. She died of breast cancer in 1995.

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”

– May Sarton