Edna St. Vincent Millay (USA) 1892-1950

Edna St. Vincent Millay (USA)

1892-1950

 

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine in 1892, the daughter of a school teacher and Cora Buzelle. Cora divorced her husband in 1900 for financial irresponsibility and moved with her daughters to Camden, Maine, supporting them through nursing. She encouraged their artistic temperaments, particularly in music and reading. Attending the local high school, Edna wrote for and served as the editor of the school magazine, publishing juvenile pieces in magazine.

     Her first major poem, “Renascence,” was published in an anthology, The Lyric Year, in 1912, shortly before she entered Vassar. There she wrote poetry and plays, acting in her own work, The Princess Marries the Page. She studied literature and languages, but also rebelled against the rules to protect the women students. Millay graduated in 1917, publishing Renascence and Other Poems the same year. In New York, living in Greenwich Village, she became involved with Provincetown Players and began affairs with several writers, including the novelist Floyd Dell and married poet Arthur Davidson Ficke. She survived mostly on publishing short stories and winnings from poetry magazines. In 1919 she wrote and directed the antiwar verse play, Aria da Capo. After meeting critic Edmund Wilson, she convinced him to publish several of her poems in Vanity Fair.

     Her second book of poetry, A Few Figs and Thistles was published in 1920. Writing for Vanity Fair, Millay traveled to Europe from 1920 to 1923, publishing another book of poetry, Second April, during her travels. Throughout this period, she continued to have several affairs, first with a French violinist, that led to an abortion, and then with the poet Witter Bynner. After receiving an advance for a novel (never completed) from Liveright, she brought her mother to Europe, as the two toured France and England before returning to New York.

     Her collection The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems of 1923 won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, making her the first woman poet to win that award. The same year she married Eugen Jan Boissevain, an American importer of Dutch-Irish background, who was sensitive to and supportive of her highly bohemian behavior. With her husband, Millay toured extensively, finally settling on 700 acres of farmland near Austerlitz, New York in 1925. The same year, she wrote the libretto form Deems Taylor’s opera, The Kings Henchman, which premiered in 1927 at the Metropolitan Opera.

     The same year, she became emotionally involved in the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists and labor agitators convicted of murder. The two were executed in 1927, and Millay joined the numerous intellectuals in protest, appealing personally to the Governor of the state. Participating in the “death watch,” Millay was arrested and jailed, in response for which she published “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” in The New York Times.

     The deaths of her close poet-friend, Elinor Wyle in 1928, her mother in 1931 and her estranged father in 1935 brought on severe depression. Yet, Millay continued with her love interests, condoned by her husband—including an affair with a young poet, George Dillon, which whom she collaborated with translations of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Other works of this period included The Buck in the Snow (1928), Wine from These Grapes (1934), and Conversation at Midnight (1937).

     Most of the poetry she wrote during this period was collected in Make Bright the Arrows: 1940 Notebook, but her poetry, always romantic in sensibility, now seemed, with World War II looming, dated, and the attention paid to her waned. In 1944 she suffered a nervous breakdown and was unable to write for two years. Simultaneously, she grew more and more dependent on alcohol, particularly with the death of her husband in 1949. She died alone at her home, “Steepletop,” the following year.

 

 

BOOKS OF POETRY

 

Renascence and Other Poems (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917); A Few Figs and Thistles: Poems and Four Sonnets (New York: F. Shay, 1920); Second April (New York: Harper, 1921); The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (New York: F. Shay, 1922); Poems (London: M. Secker, 1923); The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928); Wine from These Grapes (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1934); Huntsman, What Quarry? (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939); Make Bright the Arrows: 1940 Notebook (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940); Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Harper & Row, 1941); The Murder of Lidice (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942); Mine the Harvest: A Collection of New Poems (New York: Harper, 1954); Collected Lyrics (New York: Harper, 1954); Selected Poems, ed. by Colin Falck (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, ed. by Nancy Milford (New York: Modern Library, 2001); Edna St. Vincent Millay, ed. by J. D. McClatchy (New York: Modern Library, 2003)

 

 

Renascence

 

All I could see from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood;

I turned and looked another way,

And saw three islands in a bay.

So with my eyes I traced the line

Of the horizon, thin and fine,

Straight around till I was come

Back to where I'd started from;

And all I saw from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood.

Over these things I could not see;

These were the things that bounded me;

And I could touch them with my hand,

Almost, I thought, from where I stand.

And all at once things seemed so small

My breath came short, and scarce at all.

But, sure, the sky is big, I said;

Miles and miles above my head;

So here upon my back I'll lie

And look my fill into the sky.

And so I looked, and, after all,

The sky was not so very tall.

The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,

And—sure enough!—I see the top!

The sky, I thought, is not so grand;

I 'most could touch it with my hand!

And reaching up my hand to try,

I screamed to feel it touch the sky.

I screamed, and -- lo! -- Infinity

Came down and settled over me;

Forced back my scream into my chest,

Bent back my arm upon my breast,

And, pressing of the Undefined

The definition on my mind,

Held up before my eyes a glass

Through which my shrinking sight did pass

Until it seemed I must behold

Immensity made manifold;

Whispered to me a word whose sound

Deafened the air for worlds around,

And brought unmuffled to my ears

The gossiping of friendly spheres,

The creaking of the tented sky,

The ticking of Eternity.

I saw and heard, and knew at last

The How and Why of all things, past,

And present, and forevermore.

The Universe, cleft to the core,

Lay open to my probing sense

That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence

But could not, —nay! But needs must suck

At the great wound, and could not pluck

My lips away till I had drawn

All venom out.—Ah, fearful pawn!

For my omniscience paid I toll

In infinite remorse of soul.

All sin was of my sinning, all

Atoning mine, and mine the gall

Of all regret. Mine was the weight

Of every brooded wrong, the hate

That stood behind each envious thrust,

Mine every greed, mine every lust.

And all the while for every grief,

Each suffering, I craved relief

With individual desire,—

Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire

About a thousand people crawl;

Perished with each,—then mourned for all!

A man was starving in Capri;

He moved his eyes and looked at me;

I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,

And knew his hunger as my own.

I saw at sea a great fog bank

Between two ships that struck and sank;

A thousand screams the heavens smote;

And every scream tore through my throat.

No hurt I did not feel, no death

That was not mine; mine each last breath

That, crying, met an answering cry

From the compassion that was I.

All suffering mine, and mine its rod;

Mine, pity like the pity of God.

Ah, awful weight! Infinity

Pressed down upon the finite Me!

My anguished spirit, like a bird,

Beating against my lips I heard;

Yet lay the weight so close about

There was no room for it without.

And so beneath the weight lay I

And suffered death, but could not die.

 

Long had I lain thus, craving death,

When quietly the earth beneath

Gave way, and inch by inch, so great

At last had grown the crushing weight,

Into the earth I sank till I

Full six feet under ground did lie,

And sank no more, —there is no weight

Can follow here, however great.

From off my breast I felt it roll,

And as it went my tortured soul

Burst forth and fled in such a gust

That all about me swirled the dust.

 

Deep in the earth I rested now;

Cool is its hand upon the brow

And soft its breast beneath the head

Of one who is so gladly dead.

And all at once, and over all

The pitying rain began to fall;

I lay and heard each pattering hoof

Upon my lowly, thatched roof,

And seemed to love the sound far more

Than ever I had done before.

For rain it hath a friendly sound

To one who's six feet underground;

And scarce the friendly voice or face:

A grave is such a quiet place.

 

The rain, I said, is kind to come

And speak to me in my new home.

I would I were alive again

To kiss the fingers of the rain,

To drink into my eyes the shine

Of every slanting silver line,

To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze

From drenched and dripping apple-trees.

For soon the shower will be done,

And then the broad face of the sun

Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth

Until the world with answering mirth

Shakes joyously, and each round drop

Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.

How can I bear it; buried here,

While overhead the sky grows clear

And blue again after the storm?

O, multi-colored, multiform,

Beloved beauty over me,

That I shall never, never see Again!

Spring-silver, autumn-gold,

That I shall never more behold!

Sleeping your myriad magics through,

Close-sepulchred away from you!

O God, I cried, give me new birth,

And put me back upon the earth!

Upset each cloud's gigantic gourd

And let the heavy rain, down-poured

In one big torrent, set me free,

Washing my grave away from me!

 

I ceased; and through the breathless hush

That answered me, the far-off rush

Of herald wings came whispering

Like music down the vibrant string

Of my ascending prayer, and -- crash!

Before the wild wind's whistling lash

The startled storm-clouds reared on high

And plunged in terror down the sky,

And the big rain in one black wave

Fell from the sky and struck my grave.

I know not how such things can be;

I only know there came to me

A fragrance such as never clings

To aught save happy living things;

A sound as of some joyous elf

Singing sweet songs to please himself,

And, through and over everything,

A sense of glad awakening.

The grass, a-tiptoe at my ear,

Whispering to me I could hear;

I felt the rain's cool finger-tips

Brushed tenderly across my lips,

Laid gently on my sealed sight,

And all at once the heavy night

Fell from my eyes and I could see,—

A drenched and dripping apple-tree,

A last long line of silver rain,

A sky grown clear and blue again.

And as I looked a quickening gust

Of wind blew up to me and thrust

Into my face a miracle

Of orchard-breath, and with the smell,—

I know not how such things can be!—

I breathed my soul back into me.

Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I

And hailed the earth with such a cry

As is not heard save from a man

Who has been dead, and lives again.

About the trees my arms I wound;

Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;

I raised my quivering arms on high;

I laughed and laughed into the sky,

Till at my throat a strangling sob

Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb

Sent instant tears into my eyes;

O God, I cried, no dark disguise

Can e'er hereafter hide from me

Thy radiant identity!

Thou canst not move across the grass

But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,

Nor speak, however silently,

But my hushed voice will answer Thee.

I know the path that tells Thy way

Through the cool eve of every day;

God, I can push the grass apart

And lay my finger on Thy heart!

 

The world stands out on either side

No wider than the heart is wide;

Above the world is stretched the sky,—

No higher than the soul is high.

The heart can push the sea and land

Farther away on either hand;

The soul can split the sky in two,

And let the face of God shine through.

But East and West will pinch the heart

That can not keep them pushed apart;

And he whose soul is flat—the sky

Will cave in on him by and by.

 

(from Renascence and Other Poems, 1917)

 

 

 

First Fig

 

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light!

 

 

(from A Few Figs and Thistles, 1920)

 

 

Wild Swans

 

I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.

And what did I see I had not seen before?

Only a question less or a question more;

Nothing to match the fight of wild birds flying.

tiresome heart, forever living and dying,

House without air, I leave you and lock your door.

Wild swans, come over the town, come over

The town again, trailing your legs and crying!

 

(from Second April, 1921)