Halfway to Silence by May Sarton Read Free Book Online Page A

the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.
    Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.
    Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to feel assured that the way the lines appear on the screen is an accurate embodiment of the way the author wants the lines to sound. Ever since poems began to be written down, the manner in which they ought to be written down has seemed equivocal; ambiguities have always resulted. By taking advantage of the technologies available in our time, our goal is to deliver the most satisfying reading experience possible.

Halfway to Silence
    I was halfway to silence
    Halfway to land’s end
    When I heard your voice.
    Shall I take you with me?
    Shall we go together
    All the way to silence,
    All the way to land’s end?
    Is there a choice?

Airs Above the Ground
    (Lippizan horse in Central Park)
    The white horse floats above the field,
    Pegasus in a child’s dream by Chagall
    Where gravity itself is forced to yield—
    Oh marvelous beast who cannot ever fall!
    The horse might have been sculpted flying there;
    The muscles look engraved, taut flowing powers;
    A furious gallop arrested in mid-air
    Towers over the city’s distant towers—
    So wild and beautiful we have to laugh,
    We have to weep. What is this caracole
    That moves us with the strangeness of great art?
    Dressage, control create a miracle.
    Taught through the ages first to terrify,
    To make foot soldiers turn their backs and scream
    Before a stallion turned loose in the sky,
    And now to bring us back to a lost dream—
    What is released by concentrated hours,
    The long dressage to catch a chancy rhyme,
    And craft that may sometimes harness strange powers,
    Those airs above the ground that banish time.

After All These Years
    After all these years
    When all I could caress
    Was dog head and dog ears
    When all that came to bless
    Was cat with her loud purrs,
    With what joy and what quake
    I kiss small naked ears
    And stroke a marble cheek,
    After all these years
    Let sleeping beauty wake.

Two Songs
    1
Give me a love
That has never been,
Deeper than thought.
Bring earth alive,
The desert green
After long drought.
In the flesh, leaf,
In the bones, root,
The gardener’s hand
Untangles grief,
Invents a land.

2
What other lover
Could ever displace
Despair with all-heal,
Or help me uncover
Sweet herb-of-grace
In the desolate field?
None had your face—
So pure in its poise,
So closed in its power,
That disciplined place
Where the tragic joys
Flower and re-flower.

The Oriole
When maples wear their aureole
Of gauzy green,
Then, only once, I heard the oriole
But rarely seen.
So it was when I found a home
After long unrest,
So it is once more now love has come
To hold me fast.
At the top of the