Mislaid Poets: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay seems to have been quite the liberated character--sassy with authority, loving whomever she chose, having an open marriage. There's also something tragic, her shying away from the public when she'd lost her looks. She died a year after losing her husband, falling down the stairs.

Her popularity has eroded somewhat. While her subject matter and gender are vogue, her method is not. But she still has much to offer.

Her "Fig" poems are kind of epigrammatic anti-proverbs, perhaps intended to be contrary wisdom, even a little sacreligious (figs possibly being the forbidden fruit that gained humanity knowledge between good and evil and the leaves the first couple used to hide behind). Supposedly the poems were an anthem for the Twenties, but also, in retrospect, speaks of her own life:

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!

Second Fig 

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

Her sonnets, often about love like Shakespeare, have their enchantments and also like Shakespeare, the imagery is spare. The one that holds up after multiple readings and may be the best is "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed":

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there sits a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

This is beautiful verse (although for some it may a double melancholic ring with its frank sexuality) is both sweet and melancholy, remembering the passing of lovers and the passing of one's youth and perhaps beauty as well. She was only 31 at its publishing, which seems premature, but maybe she saw the wall's scrawl.

A popular but, in my ear, less resonant sonnet is "Love Is Not All" which has some great lines:

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink...
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath...
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone...
I might be driven to sell your love for peace...
It may well be. I do not think I would.

That last line, even with its uncertainty, doesn't change the poem's direction much. Would it be better to choose one or the other? Maybe. Especially if the persona would sell the love which is sort of interesting, but it still doesn't do the sonnet's job of changing lanes. Apparently it does for other readers.

Two short bird poems ("Wild Swans" and "Passer Moruus Est") moved me. The first seems to be a call to abandon normal life for one of wildness: "Houses 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!" The second uses the death of the sparrow as an occasion to remark, "Need we say it was not love, / Now that love has perished?"

Millay was well respected for the long poem. There was an outcry when she didn't win a contest for "Renascence" which propelled her into poetry's relative fame. She also won a Pulitzer for "Harpweaver" although Untermeyer thought it sentimental. "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" is interesting for the opening lines:

So she came back into his house again
And watched beside his bed until he died,
Loving him not at all.

Intriguing stuff. The persona goes about her business with some keen imagery, but again not much changing directions for a group of sonnets. One wonders with a number of these longer poems if they could have been stronger as shorter works.

Louis Untermeyer has the most complete assessment of her work, tackling each book, and some of the best selections. Millay as a reader has a curious voice--part British, part American, part...? She chants as Yeats and other poets insisted it should be done, yet with her background in theater, she also follows the emotion more than most poets of her time did.