Each summer I return to New Hampshire and often drive through Nelson where May Sarton lived for fifteen years of her adult life. Although she didn’t live in Nelson when she passed, she wished to be buried in this small town, the only place where she ever owned a home.

Behind the stone gates of a classic New England cemetery, nestled on a hillside surrounded by forests is May Sarton’s grave. Her marker is a phoenix, commissioned and sculpted by her friend Barbara Barton, and presented to Sarton in 1976, almost twenty years before her death. Although not designed as such, early on she decided that it was to be her grave marker.

Sarton’s phoenix is a more delicate stone among the traditional slabs of slate and granite. One roaming the cemetery is certainly drawn to her by the yearning image of the phoenix and the flickering of the flat flames.

The phoenix “was May’s chosen symbol: the ardent spirit rising again and again from the ashes of defeat,” explains Margot Peters in her biography of May Sarton. Of this prized sculpture, Sarton herself remarked, “It does just what I wanted, gives a sense of an uprush of flight” (316).

I imagine Sarton’s spirit continually catches this uprush of flight on this sloping hill with a view, in the company of many of her former Nelson neighbors and friends. It’s a peaceful spot, soft with green moss that will soon be layered with colorful leaves and before long, blanketed in a pure white.

Sarton felt the seasons, nature’s and those that cycled through her veins. Hers was a  hot-cold, light-dark existence, cycles of extremes that she struggled to understand and tame, never too successfully. The closest she came was through her art: her poetry, novels and journals. I love that she’s buried here, her remains part of the rugged New Hampshire soil that is also difficult to tame.

Every time I read this poem of May Sarton’s, it sends a shiver down my spine:

The Phoenix Again

On the ashes of this nest
Love wove with deathly fire
The phoenix takes its rest
Forgetting all desire.

After the flame, a pause,
After the pain, rebirth.
Obeying nature’s laws
The phoenix goes to earth.

You cannot call it old
You cannot call it young.
No phoenix can be told,
This is the end of the song.

It struggles now alone
Against death and self-doubt,
But underneath the bone
The wings are pushing out.

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.

 

On one of my drives through Nelson, I’ll stop to visit Sarton’s special spot on the hill and leave some flowers on her headstone. She cherished flowers, those growing wild in her yard as well as those she arranged in vases to adorn her home.

Rest here in peace, May Sarton. Indeed, the phoenix does not die.

Check out another of our posts about this #Nasty Woman Writer: May Sarton: Leaping the Waterfalls.

©Maria Dintino 2026

Works Cited:

Peters, Margot. May Sarton: a Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.