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Here is a glass of water from my well.
It tastes of rock and root and earth and rain;
It is the best I have, my only spell,
And it is cold, and better than champagne.
Perhaps someone will pass this house one day
To drink, and be restored, and go his way…May Sarton (link)
A Glass of Water
Collected Poems: 1930–1993
May Sarton has long been, for me, a sustaining presence – one of those rare writers whose voice seems not only to speak, but to accompany. I return to her work again and again, not out of habit alone, but out of a quiet recognition: that here is someone who has lived fully within the tensions that shape a human life – solitude and connection, suffering and delight, restraint and ardour – and has not turned away.
Her writing carries the imprint of a life deeply felt. There is no evasion in it. She does not disguise loneliness, nor does she sentimentalise love. Instead, she holds both with a kind of steady gaze, allowing each its weight and its dignity. It is this honesty that first drew me to her, and it is this same quality that continues to call me back. To read her is to encounter a sensibility that has endured, questioned, and still chosen to remain open – to beauty, to others, to the difficult work of being alive.
Over the years, I have come to feel not only admiration for her courage and clarity, but also a kind of empathy – a sense of kinship across distance. Her struggles, though uniquely her own, echo in quieter ways in the lives of those who read her. There is something profoundly human in her oscillation between withdrawal and longing, in her effort to reconcile the need for solitude with the desire to be known. These are not abstract concerns; they are lived realities, and she renders them with such care that one cannot help but feel accompanied in one’s own.
I often think of her image of offering ‘a glass of water from my well.’ It is a gesture both simple and generous: an offering of what one has, drawn from one’s own depths, given freely to whoever might pass by. In returning to her work, I am conscious of myself as such a passerby – a stranger, in one sense, who comes to the well of another. And yet, over time, that strangeness softens. The well becomes familiar, its waters recognized, even anticipated. What was once an encounter becomes a kind of relationship, quiet but enduring.
Each return is slightly different. The same words yield new meanings, shaped by the changing, searching contours of my own life. What once seemed distant now feels immediate; what once comforted may now challenge. The water still quenches thirst. There is a constancy in her voice that does not impose itself, but waits – patiently – until one is ready to receive it again.
To admire May Sarton is, for me, inseparable from this act of returning. It is not a static admiration, fixed in time, but a living one, renewed with each reading. And in that renewal, there is gratitude: for the depth from which she drew, for the courage with which she offered it, and for the quiet assurance that, whenever I come back – stranger or not – the water will still be there.
Perhaps someone will pass this house one day …
The ‘house’ and the ‘well’ remain—though the poet’s life blossomed into all eternity in July 1995. And – along with other such abiding loves and friendships – I drink still-living water.
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See also: Wonderment and Hello Jack Frost
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