Edna
St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) grew up in small towns in the state of Maine in
the U.S.A. Millay’s mother was her only parent for most of her upbringing, and
the family was so poor that Millay and her two sisters would sometimes ice
skate in the living room on the water that had flooded their house from a
nearby creek and had frozen.
Edna St. Vincent Millay by Washington Square Arch in Greenwich Village
Millay's mother was a visiting nurse who was often
gone from the family. An intelligent, self-educated woman, Millay’s mother
instilled in her three daughters a love of learning and poetry, as well as
providing a strong role model. Here’s Millay’s tribute to her mother:
The
courage that my mother had
Went
with her, and is with her still:
Rock
from New England quarried;
Now
granite in a granite hill.
The
golden brooch my mother wore
She left
behind for me to wear;
I have
no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it
is something I could spare.
Oh, if
instead she’d left to me
The
thing she took into the grave!—
That
courage like a rock, which she
Has no
more need of, and I have.
By an odd set of circumstances,
Edna St. Vincent Millay became a famous poet at the age of nineteen by losing a
literary contest. She entered her poem “Renascence” in a contest called The Lyric Year, something like The Best Poems of… series that is
published today. The judges wanted to pick Millay’s poem for the first prize,
but when it became known that the winner was an unknown young woman from a
small town, they changed their minds and gave her the fourth prize. A judge who opposed
the decision publicized his grievance, and the ensuing scandal made Millay a
literary celebrity, as well as helping her to gain a full scholarship to Vassar
College.
Millay (who went by the nickname
“Vincent”) went on from there to conquer Greenwich Village’s literary bohemia.
She wrote startling poetry that embodied the values of the Roaring 20s and the
radical 1930s: free love, opposition to World War I, support for the republic
in the Spanish Civil War. Here is her Sonnet CXXVIII, with its frank
confessions:
I too
beneath your moon, almighty Sex,
Go forth
at nightfall crying like a cat,
Leaving
the lofty tower I labored at
For
birds to foul and boys and girls to vex
With
tittering chalk; and you, and the long necks
Of
neighbors sitting where their mothers sat
Are well
aware of shadowy this and that
In me,
that’s neither noble nor complex.
Such as
I am, however, I have brought
To what
it is, this tower; it is my own;
Though
it was reared To Beauty, it was wrought
From
what I had to build with: honest bone
Is
there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought;
And lust
is there, and nights not spent alone.
I keep going back to Millay’s
poetry, partly because she is such an unapologetic advocate of passion, but with so many nuances—check out the word "anguish" in the penultimate line of this sonnet. I also
read her poems over and over because she chooses such unusual and modern
topics, curiously combined with a retro love for and mastery of the sonnet form,
particularly the very continental Petrarchan sonnet, while most English-language
poets favor the Shakespearean. This is one of my favorite
sonnets of Millay’s, because it contains such a modern sensibility in an ornately carved ivory box:
Sonnet
XLIII
Still
will I harvest beauty where it grows:
In
coloured fungus and the spotted fog
Surprised
on foods forgotten; in ditch and bog
Filmed
brilliant with irregular rainbows
Of rust
and oil, where half a city throws
Its
empty tins; and in some spongy log
Whence
headlong leaps the oozy emerald frog….
And a
black pupil in the green scum shows.
Her the
inhabiter of diverse places
Surmising
at all doors, I push them all.
Oh, you
that fearful of a creaking hinge
Turn
back forevermore with craven faces,
I tell
you Beauty bears an ultra fringe
Unguessed
of you upon her gossamer shawl!
This is not just a poem about
pretty, little moments. It’s about seeking and still finding beauty in a world
where pollution and urban life deposit “rust and oil” in nature. The last four
lines contain a challenge to anyone who refuses to see that our era, flawed by
progress though it may be, is still a time of great beauty, beauty that might
be more “ultra” (what a great word!) than what came before.
Millay was also a philosopher. Her literary work features five plays in verse, including Conversations at Midnight, where a group of men conduct an after-dinner Platonic dialogue over whiskey and cigars, discussing politics, art, and other topics. The play has an interesting history. Millay wrote a draft of it while on a road trip in Florida with her husband in 1936. The two of them checked into their room at a hotel and went for a walk. As they returned from their stroll, they noticed a column of smoke rising in the air. The hotel had burned down, along with her manuscript. Millay had to recreate the entire script from memory.
Among Millay’s more philosophical
works, I like many of her later sonnets where she contemplates the large
questions—the place of humanity in the long history of Earth and in the cosmos.
Here is her Sonnet CXXIV, again featuring the moon:
Enormous
moon, that rise behind these hills
Heavy
and yellow in a sky unstarred
And
pale, your girth by purple fillets barred
Of
drifting cloud, that as the cool sky fills
With
planets and the brighter stars, distills
To
thinnest vapor and floats valley-ward,—
You
flood with radiance all this cluttered yard,
The
sagging fence, the chipping window sills.
Grateful
at heart as if for my delight
You
rose, I watch you through a mist of tears,
Thinking
how man, who gags upon despair,
Salting
his hunger with the sweat of fright
Has fed
on cold indifference all these years,
Calling
it kindness, calling it God’s care.
Fascinating that she uses "rise" for the moon in line 1 and not "rises." I think she is addressing the moon—"you that rise." What is so haunting for me about this poem is that Millay refuses a sloppy faith in a caring divinity she cannot see in the skies. But this is not a bleak world she describes, despite the absence of a god or goddess to protect us. There are sagging fences and chipping window sills and tears of pity for the millennia of ignorance that came before. But Millay balances those imperfections with the plenitude of a twilight where the moon floats upward as “the cool sky fills/With planets and brighter stars...”
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe
Other posts on writing topics:
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry?
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry
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