Nearly every morning, Peggy Freydberg sat inside a large canvas tent in her Martha’s Vineyard backyard, drawing inspiration from the sounds of egrets and quiet scenes she captured in poems like “Mornings At Seven”:
Wild geese stir in the early morning calm
with the ripple of their wake.
Far off,
near the shore’s arm of dune that holds the pond,
a kayak glides,
someone seeking peace
and looking up to find it in the sky.
With a typewriter and stack of yellow legal pads, she spent her days writing about nature and reflecting on her long life.
“She exclaimed about the incredible, incredible smell of the lilac, or about a goose out on the lawn,” said her granddaughter Tamara Sloan of Ashfield. “She really soaked in beauty and lived in the here and now.”
Mrs. Freydberg, who lived in Chilmark and died March 27 at 107, offered readers a different view of the Vineyard and even the weather through the lens of poems such as “Blizzard”:
It takes courage to see beauty
in a world spread deep and silent
with interminable whiteness;
and to keep on being awed
by such uncommon splendor
while trying to suppress
a fundamental fear
of being buried by it.
But know it as it is:
Beauty is everlasting.
And winter’s burial is not.
Underneath cold winter bone,
the flesh of summer sleeps.
Margaret Howe Freydberg, whose health declined after she fell at home this winter, moved to the Vineyard full time in 1968 with her second husband, Nicholas Freydberg. Her house overlooked Stonewall Pond and was a quiet escape for many family members, a place her grandchildren and great-grandchildren spent parts of the summer, and where many went in times of trouble.
“There was just something about her,” said her 19-year-old great-granddaughter, Zivah Solomon of Boston. “I could converse with her about things I never told anyone and she would understand. The house was always peaceful, like a constant safe haven.”
Her great-grandmother, she added, carried herself with elegance that reflected her upbringing. “She’d say ‘Oh, darling, that is just marvelous,’ or something like that,” Solomon recalled. “She had a very distinct way of speaking.”
Sloan said her grandmother focused undivided attention on anyone who visited and “treated us like mini-adults. She was straightforward and wanted to know about our lives. You could be yourself in front of her.”
One of four children, Margaret Howe spent much of her childhood in Rochester, N.Y.
She attended the Masters School, a boarding school in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., where she discovered her love of studying and books, she told the Vineyard Gazette.
In the 1920s, she married Samuel Sloan, a literary scout for a New York City publishing house, and their travels for pleasure and work eventually took them to France. “We moved to Paris because Sam’s job was to find French authors,” Mrs. Freydberg told the Vineyard Gazette in 2012. She began writing descriptions of her life in France and published her work in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.
After the couple returned to New York, Samuel Sloan helped found the publishing house Duell, Sloan and Pearce.
“Her younger time was like the ‘Great Gatsby’ era, but she hated talking about it,” Tamara said. “She must have had a blast in the moment, but she never liked to look back.”
The couple had a son, Samuel Sloan, who now lives in Santa Fe, N.M., and a daughter, Laidily MacBride, who lives in Baltimore.
“Her eyes were just fascinating, the way they sparkled,” her son recalled. “I don’t know how she did that.”
After Mrs. Freydberg’s first husband died in 1945, she worked as an editor at his publishing house and lived in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where she met and married Nicholas Freydberg.
“They had a tremendously affectionate relationship,” her son said, adding that Nicholas Freydberg “was very supportive of her work.”
The marriage “was a fabulous match — she grew a lot more with Nick,” Sloan said. “She fully blossomed into her life with a full sense of self. . . . It was so important to her.”
Laurie David of Chilmark worked with Mrs. Freydberg at the end of her life, helping her publish a final collection, “Poems from the Pond.” Mrs. Freydberg, David said, often reminisced about falling in love with Nick, who died in 1994.
“She loved to tell a story about the most passionate kiss he ever gave her,” David said. “One night, after a drink of Scotch whiskey, he planted a deep kiss on her lips. She would describe it in detail as if it was yesterday.”
Using music as a metaphor, Mrs. Freydberg wrote about her affection for her second husband in “Falling in Love,” which begins “What kind of an instrument was I” and includes the lines:
I could have called myself a Stradivarius,
for though I, of course, was just an ordinary violin,
waiting,
ready to be held for the first time in a musician’s hands,
primed to be played,
mobilized by all my busy genes
to become music –
when first I felt the quiver
of its stirring sound,
I became, imparadised,
the most priceless stringed instrument
on the face of the earth.
Mrs. Freydberg’s first novel, “The Bride,” was published in 1952, and her other books of fiction and poetry included “The Lovely April,” “Winter Concert,” “Katherine’s House,” “The Consequences of Loving Syrah,” “Growing Up in Old Age,” “Evening on the Pond,” “Wanting,” and “In Other Words.”
Sloan said her grandmother was in her 90s when she turned to poetry: “She told me, ‘I still need to express myself, but I can’t pull off another novel.’ So she went for short-form poetry and was very good at it.”
A memorial gathering will be announced for Mrs. Freydberg, who in addition to her son, daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter leaves six other grandchildren and seven other great-grandchildren.
“Writing,” Mrs. Freydberg told the Vineyard Gazette in 2003, when she was in her 90s, “is an absolute need for me – the need to express myself and express experience.”
In “Chorus of Cells,” a poem from her final book, she addressed how in old age “the constancy of my breathing . . . bears the news I am alive,” and wrote about the sustaining virtue of a simple routine, like making her bed each morning.
I smooth away the dreams disclosed by tangled sheets,
I smack the dented pillow’s revelations to oblivion,
I finish with the pattern of the spread exactly centered.
The night is won.
And now the day can open.
Jacqueline Tempera can be reached at jacqueline.tempera@globe.com