What’s this of death, from you who never will die?
I see so clearly now my similar years
Your face is like a chamber where a king
The light comes back with Columbine; she brings
Lord Archer, Death, whom sent you in your stead?
Loving you less than life, a little less
I, being born a woman and distressed
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why
Still will I harvest beauty where it grows
How healthily their feet upon the floor
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare
Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree
So she came back into his house again
The last white sawdust on the floor was grown
She filled her arms with wood, and set her chin
The white bark writhed and sputtered like a fish
A wagon stopped before the house; she heard
Then cautiously she pushed the cellar door
One way there was of muting in the mind
She let them leave their jellies at the door
Not over-kind nor over-quick in study
She had forgotten how the August night
It came into her mind, seeing how the snow
Tenderly, in those times, as though she fed
From the wan dream that was her waking day
She had a horror he would die at night
There was upon the sill a pencil mark
The doctor asked her what she wanted done
Gazing upon him now, severe and dead
From The Buck in the Snow
Life, were thy pains as are the pains of hell
Grow not too high, grow not too far from home
Not that it matters, not that my heart’s cry
Country of hunchbacks!—where the strong, straight spine
Upon this marble bust that is not I
For this your mother sweated in the cold
Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease!
Fatal Interview
What thing is this that, built of salt and lime
This beast that rends me in the sight of all
No lack of counsel from the shrewd and wise
Nay, learned doctor, these fine leeches fresh
Of all that ever in extreme disease
Since I cannot persuade you from this mood
Night is my sister, and how deep in love
Yet in an hour to come, disdainful dust
When you are dead, and your disturbing eyes
Strange thing that I, by nature nothing prone
Not in a silver casket cool with pearls
Olympian gods, mark now my bedside lamp
I said, seeing how the winter gale increased
Since of no creature living the last breath
My worship from this hour the Sparrow-Drawn
I dreamed I moved among the Elysian fields
Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart
Shall I be prisoner till my pulses stop
My most distinguished guest and learned friend
Think not, nor for a moment let your mind
Gone in good sooth you are: not even in dream
Now by this moon, before this moon shall wane
I know the face of Falsehood and her tongue
Whereas at morning in a jeweled crown
Peril upon the paths of this desire
Women have loved before as I love now
Moon, that against the lintel of the west
When we are old and these rejoicing veins
Heart, have no pity on this house of bone
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
When we that wore the myrtle wear the dust
Time, that is pleased to lengthen out the day
Sorrowful dreams remembered after waking
Most wicked words!-forbear to speak them out
Clearly my ruined garden as it stood
Hearing your words, and not a word among them
Believe, if ever the bridges of this town
You say: “Since life is cruel enough at best”
Love me no more, now let the god depart
You loved me not at all, but let it go
I said in the beginning, did I not?
O ailing Love, compose your struggling wing!
Summer, be seen no more within this wood
If to be left were to be left alone
I know my mind and I have made my choice
Even in the moment of our earliest kiss
Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly
Now by the path I climbed, I journey back
There is a well into whose bottomless eye
The heart once broken is a heart no more
If in the years to come you should recall
Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave
From Wine from These Grapes
As men have loved their lovers in times past
Where can the heart be hidden in the ground
From Huntsman, What Quarry?
Enormous moon, that rise behind these hills
Now let the mouth of wailing for a time
Thou famished grave, I will not fill thee yet
Now that the west is washed of clouds and clear
I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex
When did I ever deny, though this was fleeting
Be sure my coming was a sharp offense
Not only love plus awful grief
If there were balm in Gilead, I would go
Count them unclean, these tears that turn no mill
See how these masses mill and swarm
His stalk the dark delphinium
No further from me than my hand
Upon this age, that never speaks its mind
My earnestness, which might at first offend
From Make Bright the Arrows
I must not die of pity; I must live
How innocent of me and my dark pain
From Wine from These Grapes
Epitaph for the Race of Man
Before this cooling planet shall be cold
When Death was young and bleaching bones were few
Cretaceous bird, your giant claw no lime
O Earth, unhappy planet born to die
When Man is gone and only gods remain
See where Capella with her golden kids
He heard the coughing tiger in the night
Observe how Miyanoshita cracked in two
He woke in terror to a sky more bright
The broken dike, the levee washed away
Sweeter was loss than silver coins to spend
Now forth to meadow as the farmer goes
His heatless room the watcher of the stars
Him not the golden fang of furious heaven
Now sets his foot upon the eastern sill
Alas for Man, so stealthily betrayed
Only the diamond and the diamond’s dust
Here lies, and none to mourn him but the sea
From Mine the Harvest
Those hours when happy hours were my estate
Not, to me, less lavish—though my dreams have been splendid
Tranquility at length, when autumn comes
And is indeed truth beauty?—at the cost
To hold secure the province of Pure Art
And if I die, because that part of me
It is the fashion now to wave aside
Admetus, from my marrow’s core I do
What chores these churls do put upon the great
I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
Come home, victorious wounded!—let the dead
Read history: so learn your place in Time
Read history: thus learn how small a space
My words that once were virtuous and expressed
Now sits the autumn cricket in the grass
And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you
If
I die solvent—die, that is to say
Grief that is grief and properly so hight
Felicity of Grief!—even Death being kind
What rider spurs him from the darkening east
Index of Titles and First Lines
Photos, Letters & More . . .
About the book
About the author
Read on
Books by
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
The first edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Collected Poems was published in 1956 by the poet’s younger sister Norma, who served as Millay’s literary executor from 1950 until her death in 1986 at age ninety-two. A devoted “keeper of the flame,” Norma had previously published Mine the Harvest (1954), a selection of poems written from 1939 to 1950, and several unpublished early poems she discovered, scrawled in longhand, in Millay’s writing notebooks.
In the nine books of poetry Millay published in her lifetime, the lyrics were placed at the beginning of the book, the sonnets at the end. (The exception is Fatal Interview, which is comprised of sonnets only.) In editing Collected Poems, Norma created a similar arrangement: the book begins with the lyrics from individual books, reprinted in chronological order, followed by the sonnets. This new edition, which preserves Norma’s ordering system, also includes an index of titles and first lines and several other new features.
A thirty-two-page P.S. section provides the reader with a richly textured introduction to Millay’s life and the inspiration for her work. It includes a biographical critical essay, a collection of photographs from the Millay Society archives, and excerpts from the poet’s personal letters to family, friends, and her beloved editor Cass Canfield, chairman of the board of Harper & Brothers.
“The faults as well as the virtues of this poetry are my own,” Millay wrote to Mr. Canfield in 1946. The virtues of her work have defied the differences in generations, and her poems—often traditional in form but timeless in their message—continue to attract an ever-expanding audience of readers.
Elizabeth Barnett and Holly Peppe
Literary Executors, Edna St. Vincent Millay
New York City, December 2010
From Renascence
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 standi
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, sickening, 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 under ground;
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
Collected Poems Page 2
