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May Sarton (1912-1995) was a prolific American poet, novelist, and memoirist whose work often explored themes of solitude, aging, relationships, and the inner life. Born Eleanore Marie Sarton in Wondelgem, Belgium, she immigrated to the United States with her family at age four to escape World War I.
Sarton’s literary career spanned over six decades, during which she published nearly 60 works, including 19 novels, 17 poetry collections, and 15 memoirs. After a brief acting career with Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York, Sarton devoted herself entirely to writing.
Her journals, particularly “Journal of a Solitude” (1973), are among her most beloved works, exploring the tensions between her need for solitude and her desire for connection. Sarton was one of the first American writers to address lesbian themes openly in her work, most notably in her 1965 novel “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing.”
Sarton settled in Nelson, New Hampshire, and later York, Maine, where she lived alone and continued writing until her death. Though critically overlooked during much of her lifetime, her reputation has grown posthumously, with her work being valued for its honesty, emotional depth, and attention to the natural world.
Here is one of her most well-known poems:
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!
