things were distributed, in a crush of cursing and blows and the breaking-out of scuffles!... So it was... while they sought work and found none, and knocked at people's doors and they were not opened to them, and asked alms of the passers-by, going and coming, and were given nothing. So it was... and she could have wished her ears stopped, that she might hear nothing of what she heard, and her eyes put out, that she might see nothing of what she saw; could have wished to hurry her days on, or to hold them back, that she might stay them at every sunrise and every sunset, when she would see her young man off from afar as he left his tent in his rebellious stillness, and would welcome her young man from afar as he came back to his tent in his turbulent silence; and she feared for him from that revolt, and dreaded for him that tumult, passing her day in anxiety, spending her night in sleeplessness — until there came a long day, and then a longer night, and she went out into the open, leaned her back against an olive trunk, and let her gaze go out over the sweep of the slope: the scattered lamps glimmered faintly, then died away in the breath of the mist; the tender moon and the scattered stars sparkled, mirrored on the deep of the bay, then vanished into the light clouds that raced from one quarter to bank in another; the wind blew in soft wafting breaths, perfumed with the smell of plowed earth and the fragrance of the herbs, charged with the purling of the brook and the croaking of the frogs and the droning of the crickets; and through all this she heard the tread of sandals, and turned — and there was Fawwaz drawing near her, saying:
— Is it you, Nahla?!...
— Fawwaz!...
— What are you doing here?!...
— Nothing!... All I know is that sleep has fled from my eyelids... and that the hut holds no more than my father and my mother!...
— Unlike my tent!... whose
emptiness longs for its second person!... Nahla...
He said this, and she knew nothing till his two arms were reaching out to her, and till she was nestling, trembling and weeping, between his arms, his lips straying over her hair and her ear and the sides of her neck:
— My Nahla!... Nahla!... We have a right to life!... A right like others!... Then why should I not live with you, Nahla, and you live with me?!... Why...
* * *
And Nahla stirred between his arms to wind her own arms about him, as his lips went seeking her lips; but she felt herself give a light shudder, for there had shown to her the other glow in the flood of the twilight, where the
colors mingled on the horizon, then floated over the wooded rocky hills, and flowed down over the levels of the slope and the path and the spring!...
And she stood at the spring contemplating that world waking around her, and everything was as she had known it since her feet first trod this ground: these waters gushing from the cave, then running down their channel; these stones and thorns and grasses wet with the night's dew and the morning's moisture; these sparrows chirping on the boughs, then fluttering up in flocks and flying, free and unbound, toward the places of light; and yet, for all that, it seemed to her as though something like a desolate stillness and a dread silence had closed down upon
was not born in America but came to it from a European country. But are not all Americans "foreigners" in America? Have not some of those who came to America as she did become distinguished writers? Yes — but the matter is a matter of feeling: she is American in domicile, in tongue, in writing, and in passport, but European in her longings; she lives in America and thinks of Europe; here she lies down to rest, but there her dreams go wandering. It is for this that I said the "coming of age" she imagined she had reached in 1940 was only a wish. And here are her novels, every one of them, even those not yet published, with their events set entirely in Europe; and say the same of the majority of her poems. How could it be otherwise, when she believes that the American heritage is foreign to her, and that it is almost nonexistent, so that it cannot, things being so, conceivably influence her production?
Yet if you look into May Sarton's poetry, you will find only in a little of it any trace of this unrest that possesses her. It is sweet, flowing verse, brimming with life and love and beauty and rapture. She believes in lyric poetry, in personal subjects within it, and in short poems; among Europe's poets she prefers Yeats in England, Valéry in France, and Rilke in Germany; and she detests the deliberate obscurity that cripples a large part of modern poetry. For this her poetry stands nearer to readers than the poetry of many of her contemporaries, and it carried to them the breath of an east wind in a season when the winds had fallen still — or, when they stirred, blew wild.
*
The piece published with this article is taken from the collection The Lion and the Rose, which appeared four years ago and held the yield of "ten years of the heart's blood and the mind's labor." In this collection, as in the other volumes, are a number of love poems that may stand among the finest love poetry of the past quarter-century.