SOURCE: Pobo, Kenneth G. “The Light That Stayed On: Imagery of Silence and Light in Halfway to Silence, Letters from Maine, and The Silence Now.” In A House of Gathering: Poets on May Sarton's Poetry, edited and with an introduction by Marilyn Kallet, pp. 191-98. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Pobo discusses the regenerative properties of lightness and silence in Sarton's poetry.

E. M. Forster's famous epigraph at the beginning of Howard's End—“only connect”—could serve as an epigraph to many of May Sarton's poems. Sarton is eighty and has published three books of poetry during the last twelve years. These three books strongly connect to her earlier works; however, they also show a poet continuously challenged by the discipline of verse itself, by the way the line shapes rhythm, by sound (as the Maine shoreline is revised by the endless push of...