Cultural Ephemera: Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Carpeted Staircase

I can't remember being smitten by an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem before. Here is "April," a recent Poem of the Day featured at Poetry Foundation.

It doesn't get interesting until she gets to the maggots squirming in brains--"Not only under ground are the brains of men / Eaten by maggots"--an unexpected image from what came before, but it's interesting also in that it is life in death ("there is no death").

The ending is good, but this phrase was the most fascinating bit: "a flight of uncarpeted stairs"--as a metaphor for life being nothing. Does that mean that carpeted stairs is something? The poem reveals itself as a product of its time, a flag of history where carpet on stairs was a technological thing of wonder, perhaps something to be envied (they're so rich they have carpet on their stairs!).

This thing we now take for granted--a simple option homeowners briefly think about--was once a wonder, perhaps even a thing of joy.

A brief search shows carpet was beginning to be affordable in the mid 19th century, with some innovations in the early 20th century. No way to know when it fir
st became a thing to fit carpet on the stairs.

Belatedly, it strikes me that the carpeted stairs could be a joke (oh, remember when people used to think carpets on stairs was novel? ha, ha--my parents were such rubes). Even so, the innovation would have to been within or very near Edna's lifetime, for that to have been a joke.