May Sarton is the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995), an American poet, novelist and memoirist.
And one cold starry night Whatever your belief The phoenix will take flight Over the seas of grief To sing her thrilling song To stars and waves and sky For neither old nor young The phoenix does not die.
I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.
Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.
One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?
I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.
I am not ready to die, But I am learning to trust death As I have trusted life.
I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward
No partner in a love relationship. . . should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.
If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.
Fighting dragons is my holy joy.
letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.
I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.
When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.
Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.
For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were being asked an inescapable question by an angel with whom I must wrestle to get at the answer.
Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.
Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.
I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.
I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.