Book Read Free

Collected Poems

Page 11

by Edna St. Vincent Millay


  Hangman’s Oak

  Before the cock in the barnyard spoke,

  Before it well was day,

  Horror like a serpent from about the Hangman’s Oak

  Uncoiled and slid away.

  Pity and Peace were on the limb

  That bore such bitter fruit.

  Deep he lies, and the desperate blood of him

  Befriends the innocent root.

  Brother, I said to the air beneath the bough

  Whence he had swung,

  It will not be long for any of us now;

  We do not grow young.

  It will not be long for the knotter of ropes, not long

  For the sheriff or for me,

  Or for any of them that came five hundred strong

  To see you swing from a tree.

  Side by side together in the belly of Death

  We sit without hope,

  You, and I, and the mother that gave you breath,

  And the tree, and the rope.

  Wine from These Grapes

  Wine from these grapes I shall be treacling surely

  Morning and noon and night until I die.

  Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.

  If you would speak with me on any matter,

  At any time, come where these grapes are grown;

  And you will find me treading them to must.

  Lean then above me sagely, lest I spatter

  Drops of the wine I tread from grapes and dust.

  Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.

  Three women come to wash me clean

  Shall not erase this stain.

  Nor leave me lying purely,

  Awaiting the black lover.

  Death, fumbling to uncover

  My body in his bed,

  Shall know

  There has been one

  Before him.

  To Those Without Pity

  Cruel of heart, lay down my song.

  Your reading eyes have done me wrong.

  Not for you was the pen bitten,

  And the mind wrung, and the song written.

  Dawn

  All men are lonely now.

  This is the hour when no man has a friend.

  Memory and Faith suspend

  From their spread wings above a cool abyss.

  All friendships end.

  He that lay awake

  All night

  For sweet love’s unregenerate sake,

  Sleeps in the grey light.

  The lover, if he dream at all,

  Dreams not of her whose languid hand sleeps open at his side;

  He is gone to another bride.

  And she he leaves behind

  Sighs not in sleep “Unkind . . . unkind . . .”;

  She walks in a garden of yellow quinces;

  Smiling, she gathers yellow quinces in a basket

  Of willow and laurel combined.

  Should I return to your door,

  Fresh and haggard out of the morning air,

  There would be darkness on the stair,

  And a dead close odour painfully sad,

  That was not there before.

  There would be silence. There would be heavy steps across the floor.

  And you would let me in, frowning with sleep

  Under your rumpled hair.

  Beautiful now upon the ear unshut by slumber

  The rich and varied voices of the waking day!—

  The mighty, mournful whistles without number

  Of tugs and ferries, mingling, confounding, failing,

  Thinning to separate notes of wailing,

  Making stupendous music on the misty bay.

  Now through the echoing street in the growing light,

  Intent on errands that the sun approves,

  Clatter unashamed the heavy wheels and hooves

  Before the silent houses; briskly they say:

  “Marshal not me among the enterprises of the night.

  I am the beginning of the day.”

  To a Young Girl

  Shall I despise you that your colourless tears

  Made rainbows in your lashes, and you forgot to weep?

  Would we were half so wise, that eke a grief out

  By sitting in the dark, until we fall asleep.

  I only fear lest, being by nature sunny,

  By and by you will weep no more at all,

  And fall asleep in the light, having lost with the tears

  The colour in the lashes that comes as the tears fall.

  I would not have you darken your lids with weeping,

  Beautiful eyes, but I would have you weep enough

  To wet the fingers of the hand held over the eye-lids,

  And stain a little the light frock’s delicate stuff.

  For there came into my mind, as I watched you winking the tears down,

  Laughing faces, blown from the west and the east,

  Faces lovely and proud that I have prized and cherished;

  Nor were the loveliest among them those that had wept the least.

  Evening on Lesbos

  Twice having seen your shingled heads adorable

  Side by side, the onyx and the gold,

  I know that I have had what I could not hold.

  Twice have I entered the room, not knowing she was here.

  Two agate eyes, two eyes of malachite,

  Twice have been turned upon me, hard and bright.

  Whereby I know my loss.

  Oh, not restorable

  Sweet incense, mounting in the windless night!

  Dirge Without Music

  I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

  So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

  Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

  With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

  Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

  Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

  A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

  A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

  The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

  They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled

  Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.

  More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

  Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

  Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

  Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

  I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

  Memory of Cassis

  Do you recall how we sat by the smokily-burning

  Twisted odourous trunk of the olive-tree,

  In the inn on the cliff, and skinned the ripe green figs,

  And heard the white sirocco driving in the sea?

  The thunder and the smother there where like a ship’s prow

  The light-house breasted the wave? how wanly through the wild spray

  Under our peering eyes the eye of the light looked out,

  Disheveled, but without dismay?

  Do you recall the sweet-alyssum over the ledges

  Crawling and the tall heather and the mushrooms under the pines,

  And the deep white dust of the broad road leading outward

  To a world forgotten, between the dusty almonds and the dusty vines?

  Portrait

  Over and over I have heard,

  As now I hear it,

  Your voice harsh and light as the scratching of dry leaves over the hard ground,

  Your voice forever assailed and shaken by the wind from the island

  Of illustrious living and dead, that never dies down,

  And bending at moment s under the terrible weight of the perfect word,

  Here in this
room without fire, without comfort of any kind,

  Reading aloud to me immortal page after page conceived in a mortal mind.

  Beauty at such moments before me like a wild bright bird

  Has been in the room, and eyed me, and let me come near it.

  I could not ever nor can I to this day

  Acquaint you with the triumph and the sweet rest

  These hours have brought to me and always bring,—

  Rapture, coloured like the wild bird’s neck and wing,

  Comfort, softer than the feathers of its breast.

  Always, and even now, when I rise to go,

  Your eyes blaze out from a face gone wickedly pale;

  I try to tell you what I would have you know,—

  What peace it was; you cry me down; you scourge me with a salty flail;

  You will not have it so.

  Winter Night

  Pile high the hickory and the light

  Log of chestnut struck by the blight.

  Welcome-in the winter night.

  The day has gone in hewing and felling,

  Sawing and drawing wood to the dwelling

  For the night of talk and story-telling.

  These are the hours that give the edge

  To the blunted axe and the bent wedge,

  Straighten the saw and lighten the sledge.

  Here are question and reply,

  And the fire reflected in the thinking eye.

  So peace, and let the bob-cat cry.

  The Cameo

  Forever over now, forever, forever gone

  That day. Clear and diminished like a scene

  Carven in cameo, the lighthouse, and the cove between

  The sandy cliffs, and the boat drawn up on the beach;

  And the long skirt of a lady innocent and young,

  Her hand resting on her bosom, her head hung;

  And the figure of a man in earnest speech.

  Clear and diminished like a scene cut in cameo

  The lighthouse, and the boat on the beach, and the two shapes

  Of the woman and the man; lost like the lost day

  Are the words that passed, and the pain,—discarded, cut away

  From the stone, as from the memory the heat of the tears escapes.

  O troubled forms, O early love unfortunate and hard,

  Time has estranged you into a jewel cold and pure;

  From the action of the waves and from the action of sorrow forever secure,

  White against a ruddy cliff you stand, chalcedony on sard.

  Counting-out Rhyme

  Silver bark of beech, and sallow

  Bark of yellow birch and yellow

  Twig of willow.

  Stripe of green in moosewood maple,

  Colour seen in leaf of apple,

  Bark of popple.

  Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,

  Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,

  Wood of hornbeam.

  Silver bark of beech, and hollow

  Stem of elder, tall and yellow

  Twig of willow.

  The Plum Gatherer

  The angry nettle and the mild

  Grew together under the blue-plum trees.

  I could not tell as a child

  Which was my friend of these.

  Always the angry nettle in the skirt of his sister

  Caught my wrist that reached over the ground,

  Where alike I gathered,—for the one was sweet and the other wore a frosty dust—

  The broken plum and the sound.

  The plum-trees are barren now and the black knot is upon them,

  That stood so white in the spring.

  I would give, to recall the sweetness and the frost of the lost blue plums,

  Anything, anything.

  I thrust my arm among the grey ambiguous nettles, and wait.

  But they do not sting.

  West Country Song

  Sun came up, bigger than all my sorrow;

  Lark in air so high, and his song clean through me.

  Now comes night, hushing the lark in’s furrow,

  And the rain falls fine.

  What have I done with what was dearest to me?

  Thatch and wick, fagot, and tea on trivet,—

  These and more it was; it was all my cheer.

  Now comes night, smelling of box and privet,

  And the rain falls fine.

  Have I left it out in the rain?—It is not here.

  Pueblo Pot

  There as I bent above the broken pot from the mesa pueblo,

  Mournfully many times its patterned shards piecing together and laying aside,

  Appeared upon the house-top, two Navajos enchanted, the redshafted flicker and his bride,

  And stepped with lovely stride

  To the pergola, flashing the wonder of their underwings;

  There stood, mysterious and harsh and sleek,

  Wrenching the indigo berry from the shedding woodbine with strong ebony beak.

  His head without a crest

  Wore the red full moon for crown;

  The black new moon was crescent on the breast of each;

  From the bodies of both a visible heat beat down,

  And from the motion of their necks a shadow would fly and fall,

  Skimming the court and in the yellow adobe wall

  Cleaving a blue breach.

  Powerful was the beauty of these birds.

  It boomed like a struck bell in the silence deep and hot.

  I stooped above the shattered clay; passionately I cried to the beauty of these birds,

  “Solace the broken pot!”

  The beauty of these birds

  Opened its lips to speak;

  Colours were its words,

  The scarlet shaft on the grey cheek,

  The purple berry in the ebony beak.

  It said, “I cannot console

  The broken thing; I can only make it whole.”

  Wisdom, heretic flower, I was ever afraid

  Of your large, cool petals without scent!

  Shocked, betrayed,

  I turned to the comfort of grief, I bent

  Above the lovely shards.

  But their colours had faded in the fierce light of the birds.

  And as for the birds, they were gone. As suddenly as they had come, they went.

  When Caesar Fell

  When Caesar fell, where yellow Tiber rolls

  Its heavy waters muddy,

  Life, that was ebbing from a hundred holes

  In Caesar’s body,

  Cried with a hundred voices to the common air,

  The unimperial day,

  “Gather me up, oh, pour me into the veins of even a gilder of hair!

  Let me not vanish away!”

  The teeth of Caesar at the ignoble word

  Were ground together in pride;

  No sound came from his lips: the world has heard

  How Caesar died.

  In the Roman dust the cry of Caesar’s blood

  Was heard and heard without wonder

  Only by the fly that swam in the red flood

  Till his head went under.

  Lethe

  Ah, drink again

  This river that is the taker-away of pain,

  And the giver-back of beauty!

  In these cool waves

  What can be lost?—

  Only the sorry cost

  Of the lovely thing, ah, never the thing itself!

  The level flood that laves

  The hot brow

  And the stiff shoulder

  Is at our temples now.

  Gone is the fever,

  But not into the river;

  Melted the frozen pride,

  But the tranquil tide

  Runs never the warmer for this,

  Never the colder.

  Immerse the dream.

  Drench the kiss.

  Dip the song in the stream.

  On Fir
st Having Heard the Skylark

  Not knowing he rose from earth, not having seen him rise,

  Not knowing the fallow furrow was his home,

  And that high wing, untouchable, untainted,

  A wing of earth, with the warm loam

  Closely acquainted,

  I shuddered at his cry and caught my heart.

  Relentless out of heaven his sweet crying like a crystal dart

  Was launched against me. Scanning the empty sky

  I stood with thrown-back head until the world reeled.

  Still, still he sped his unappeasable shafts against my breast with-out a shield.

  He cried forever from his unseen throat

  Between me and the sun.

  He would not end his singing, he would not have done.

  “Serene and pitiless note, whence, whence are you?”

  I cried. “Alas, these arrows, how fast they fall!

  Ay, me, beset by angels in unequal fight,

  Alone high on the shaven down surprised, and not a tree in sight!”

  Even as I spoke he was revealed

  Above me in the bright air,

  A dark articulate atom in the mute enormous blue,

  A mortal bird, flying and singing in the morning there.

  Even as I spoke I spied him, and I knew,

  And called him by his name;

  “Blithe Spirit!” I cried. Transfixed by more than mortal spears

  I fell; I lay among the foreign daisies pink and small,

  And wept, staining their innocent faces with fast-flowing tears.

  To a Musician

  Who, now, when evening darkens the water and the stream is dull,

  Slowly, in a delicate frock, with her leghorn hat in her hand,

  At your side from under the golden osiers moves,

  Faintly smiling, shattered by the charm of your voice?

  There, today, as in the days when I knew you well,

  The willow sheds upon the stream its narrow leaves,

  And the quiet flowing of the water and its faint smell

  Are balm to the heart that grieves.

  Together with the sharp discomfort of loving you,

  Ineffable you, so lovely and so aloof,

  There is laid upon the spirit the calmness of the river view:

  Together they fall, the pain and its reproof.

  Who, now, under the yellow willows at the water’s edge

  Closes defeated lips upon the trivial word unspoken,

 

‹ Prev