Collected Poems

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Was not concerned with me, might possibly

  Drown me, but willed me no ill.

  How did I bear it—how could I possibly as a child,

  On my narrow shoulders and pipe-stem legs have supported

  The fragrance and the colour of the frangible hour, the deep

  Taste of the shallow dish?—It is not as if

  I had thought, being a child, that the beautiful thing would

  last: it passed while I looked at it,

  Except, of course, in memory—memory is the seventh

  Colour in the spectrum. But I knew about—when even then,

  The grapevine growing over the grey rock—the shock

  Of beauty seen, noticed, for the first time—

  I remember it well—and I remember where I stood—on which

  side of the rock.

  Already the triangular leaves on the grape-trellis are green; they

  have given me no time

  To report their colour as it was when I first

  Came upon them, wondering if the strawberry rhubarb was up,

  looking for the pretty, feared hoof-marks of deer

  In the asparagus.

  How did I bear it?—Now—grown up and encased

  In the armour of custom, after years

  Of looking at loveliness, forewarned and face to face, and no

  time and too prudent

  At six in the morning to accept the unendurable embrace,

  I come back from the garden into the kitchen, and take off my

  rubbers—the dew

  Is heavy and high, wetting the sock above the shoe—but I

  cannot do

  The housework yet.

  Men Working

  Charming, the movement of girls about a May-pole in May,

  Weaving the coloured ribbons in and out,

  Charming; youth is charming, youth is fair.

  But beautiful the movement of men striking pikes

  Into the end of a black pole, and slowly

  Raising it out of the damp grass and up into the air.

  The clean strike of the pike into the pole: beautiful.

  Joe is the boss; but Ed or Bill will say,

  “No, Joe; we can’t get it that way—

  We’ve got to take it from here. Are you okay

  On your side, Joe?” “Yes,” says the boss. “Okay.”

  The clean strike of the pike into the pole—“That’s it!”

  “Ground your pikes!”

  The grounded pikes about the rising black pole, beautiful.

  “Ed, you’d better get under here with me!” “I’m

  Under!”

  “That’s it!”

  “ Ground your pikes!”

  Joe says, “Now, boys, don’t heave

  Too hard—we’ve got her—but you, Ed, you and Mike,

  You’ll have to hold her from underneath while Bill

  Shifts his pike—she wants to fall downhill;

  We’ve got her all right, but we’ve got her on a slight

  Slant.”

  “That’s it!”—“Mike,

  About six feet lower this time.”

  “That’s it!”

  “Ground your pikes!”

  One by one the pikes are moved about the pole, more beautiful

  Than coloured ribbons weaving.

  The clean strike of the pike into the pole; each man

  Depending on the skill

  And the balance, both of body and of mind,

  Of each of the others: in the back of each man’s mind

  The respect for the pole: it is forty feet high, and weighs

  Two thousand pounds.

  In the front of each man’s mind: “She’s going to go

  Exactly where we want her to go: this pole

  Is going to go into that seven-foot hole we dug

  For her

  To stand in.”

  This was in the deepening dusk of a July night.

  They were putting in the poles: bringing the electric light

  Steepletop

  I

  Even you, Sweet Basil: even you,

  Lemon Verbena: must exert yourselves now and somewhat

  harden

  Against untimely frost; I have hovered you and covered you and

  kept going smudges,

  Until I am close to worn-out. Now, you

  Go about it. I have other things to do,

  Writing poetry, for instance. And I, too,

  Live in this garden.

  II

  Nothing could stand

  All this rain.

  The lilacs were drowned, browned before I had even smelled

  them

  Cool against my cheek, held down

  A little by my hand.

  Pain

  Is seldom preventable, but is presentable

  Even to strangers on a train—

  But what the rain

  Does to the lilacs—is something you must sigh and try

  To explain.

  III

  Borage, forage for bees

  And for those who love blue,

  Why must you,

  Having only been transplanted

  From where you were not wanted

  Either by the bee or by me

  From under the sage, engage in this self-destruction?

  I was tender about your slender tap-root.

  I thought you would send out shoot after shoot

  Of thick cucumber-smelling, hairy leaves.

  But why anybody believes

  Anything, I do not know. I thought I could trust you.

  The Gardener in Haying-Time

  I had a gardener. I had him until haying-time.

  In haying-time they set him pitching hay.

  I had two gardeners. I had them until haying-time.

  In haying-time they set them pitching hay.

  I had three gardeners. I had them until haying-time.

  —Can life go on this way?

  Sky-coloured bird, blue wings with no more spots of spotless

  white

  Dappled, than on a day in spring

  When the brown meadows trickle with a hundred brooks two

  inches broad and wink and flash back light—

  Dappled with no more white than on an all but cloudless sky

  makes clear blue deeper and more bright.

  Exquisite glutton, azure coward with proud crest

  And iridescent nape—

  Mild milky mauve, chalcedony, then lustred, and all amethyst,

  then brushed with bronze, the half-green clustered with

  the ripe grape, under the lapis crest.

  Dull-feathered bird today, pecking at ashes by the cinder-pit,

  your clanging tone alone makes known our northern jay

  Sky-coloured—under a slaty sky sky-coloured still, slate-grey.

  To a Snake

  Poor dying thing; it was m y dog, not I,

  That did for you.

  I gave you a wide arc, and moved to pass.

  And yet, I was not sad that you should die;

  You jarred me so; you were too motionless

  And sudden, coiled there in the grass.

  Now, you are coiled no longer. Now

  Your splendid, streaked back is to the ground.

  Your beautiful, light-scarlet blood is spattered,

  And shines in dreadful dew-drops all around.

  And that white, ugly belly you had not confessed,—

  So naked, so unscrolled with patterns—is at last exposed.

  Oh—oh— I do not like to see

  A fellow-mortal’s final agony!

  We shared this world all summer until now!

  Now,—of f you go.

  All upside-down you lie, less looped than flung.

  And all but done for.

  And yet,—with head still raised; and that red, flickering tongue.

  I woke in the night and heard the wind, and it blowing
half a

  gale.

  “Blizzard, by gum!” I said to myself out loud, “What an

  elegant

  Hissing and howling, what a roar!”

  And I rose, half-rose, in bed, and

  Listened to the wind, smelling new snow—

  No smell like that—a smell neither sour nor sweet—

  No fragrance, none at all, nothing to compete with, nothing to

  interfere

  With the odourless clear passage of the smell of new snow

  Through the nostrils. “Cold,” I said;

  And clawed up the extra blanket from the foot of the bed.

  Lying there, coiled and cuddled within my own warmth,

  Ephemeral but far from frail,

  I listened to the winding-up from a sound almost not heard, to

  the yelling hurling

  Thump against the house of an all-but-official gale

  And thought, “Bad night for a sail

  Except far out at sea . . .”

  And somewhere something heavy bumped and rolled

  And bumped, like a barrel of molasses loose in the hold.

  Look how the bittersweet with lazy muscle moves aside

  Great stones placed here by planning men not without sweat

  and pride.

  And yet how beautiful this broken wall applied

  No more to its first duty: to keep sheep or cattle in;

  Bought up by Beauty now, with the whole calm abandoned

  countryside.

  And how the bittersweet to meet the stunned admiring eye with

  all

  The red and orange splendour of its fruit at the first stare

  Unclasps its covering leaves, lets them all fall,

  Strips to the twig, is bare.

  See, too, the nightshade, the woody, the bittersweet, strangling

  the wall

  For this, the beauty of berries, this scandalous, bright

  Persimmon and tangerine comment on fieldstone, on granite and

  on quartz, by might

  Of men and crowbars, and a rock for lever, and a rock above a

  rock wedged in, and the leverage right,

  Wrested from the tough acres that in time must yield

  And suffer plow and harrow and be a man’s hay-field—

  Wrested, hoisted, balanced on its edge, tipped, tumbled, clear

  Of its smooth-walled cool hole lying, dark and damp side

  upward in the sun, inched and urged upon the stone-boat,

  hauled here.

  Yet mark where the rowan, the mountain ash berries, hang

  bunched amid leaves like ferns,

  Scarlet in clear blue air, and the tamarack turns

  Yellow as mustard, and sheds its short needles to lie on the

  ground like light

  Through the door of a hut in the forest to travellers miles off

  the road at night;

  Where brilliant the briony glows in the hedge, frail, clustered,

  elliptical fruit;

  Nightshade conserving in capsules transparent of jacinth and

  amber its jellies of ill-repute.

  And only the cherries, that ripened for robins and cherry-birds,

  burned

  With more ruddy a spark than the bark and the leaves of the

  cherry-tree, red in October turned.

  Truck-Garden Market-Day

  Peaceful and slow, peaceful and slow,

  Skillful and deft, in my own rhythm,

  Happy about the house I go—

  For the men are in town, and their noise gone with ’em.

  Well I remember, long ago,

  How still, in my girlish room, the night was—

  Watching the moon from my window,

  While cool on the empty bed her light was.

  More than my heart to him I gave,

  When I gave my heart in soft surrender—

  Who now am the timid, laughed-at slave

  Of a man unaware of this, and tender.

  Never must he know how I feel,

  Or how, at times, too loud his voice is—

  When, just at the creak of his wagon-wheel

  Cramped for the barn, my life rejoices!

  He would be troubled; he could not learn

  How small a part of myself I keep

  To smell the meadows, or sun the churn,

  When he’s at market, or while he’s asleep.

  Intense and terrible, I think, must be the loneliness

  Of infants—look at all

  The Teddy-bears clasped in slumber in slatted cribs

  Painted pale-blue or pink.

  And all the Easter Bunnies, dirty and disreputable, that deface

  The white pillow and the sterile, immaculate, sunny, turning

  pleasantly in space,

  Dainty abode of Baby—try to replace them

  With new ones, come Easter again, fluffy and white, and with a

  different smell;

  Release with gentle force from the horrified embrace,

  That hugs until the stitches give and the stuffing shows,

  His only link with a life of his own, the only thing he really

  knows . . .

  Try to sneak it out of sight.

  If you wish to hear anger yell glorious

  From air-filled lungs through a throat unthrottled

  By what the neighbours will say;

  If you wish to witness a human countenance contorted

  And convulsed and crumpled by helpless grief and despair,

  Then stand beside the slatted crib and say There, there, and

  take the toy away.

  Pink and pale-blue look well

  In a nursery. And for the most part Baby is really good:

  He gurgles, he whimpers, he tries to get his toe to his mouth;

  he slobbers his food

  Dreamily—cereals and vegetable juices—onto his bib:

  He behaves as he should.

  But do not for a moment believe he has forgotten Blackness;

  nor the deep

  Easy swell; nor his thwarted

  Design to remain for ever there;

  Nor the crimson betrayal of his birth into a yellow glare.

  The pictures painted on the inner eyelids of infants just before

  they sleep,

  Are not in pastel.

  Sometimes, oh, often, indeed, in the midst of ugly adver

  beautiful

  Memories return.

  You awake in wonder, you awake at half-past four,

  Wondering what wonder is in store.

  You reach for your clothes in the dark and pull them on,

  have no time

  Even to wash your face, you have to climb Megunticook.

  You run through the sleeping town; you do not arouse

  Even a dog, you are so young and so light on your feet.

  What a way to live, what a way . . .

  No breakfast, not even hungry. An apple, though,

  In the pocket.

  And the only people you meet are store-windows.

  The path up the mountain is stony and in places steep,

  And here it is really dark—wonderful, wonderful,

  Wonderful—the smell of bark

  And rotten leaves and dew! And nobody awake

  In all the world but you!—

  Who lie on a high cliff until your elbows ache,

  To see the sun come up over Penobscot Bay.

  Not for a Nation

  Not for a nation:

  Not the dividing, the estranging, thing

  For;

  Nor, in a world so small, the insulation

  Of dream from dream—where dreams are links in the chain

  Of a common hope; that man may yet regain

  His dignity on earth—where before all

  Eyes: small eyes of elephant and shark; still

  Eyes of lizard grey in the sub-tropic noon,

 
; Blowing his throat out into a scarlet, edged-with-cream incredible balloon

  Suddenly, and suddenly dancing, hoisting and lowering his body

  on his short legs on the hot stone window-sill;

  And the eyes of the upturned, grooved and dusty, rounded,

  dull cut-worm

  Staring upward at the spade,—

  These, all these, and more, from the corner of the eye see man,

  infirm,

  Tottering like a tree about to fall,—

  Who yet had such high dreams—who not for this was made (or so said he),—nor did design to die at all.

  Not for a nation,

  Not the dividing, the estranging thing

  For;

  Nor, on a world so small, the insulation

  Of dream from dream,

  In what might be today, had we been better welders, a new

  chain for pulling down old buildings, uprooting the wrong

  trees; these

  Not for;

  Not for my country right or wrong;

  Not for the drum or the bugle; not for the song

  Which pipes me away from my home against my will-along

  with the other children

  To where I would not go

  And makes me say what I promised never to say, and do the

  thing I am through with—

  Into the Piper’s Hill;

  Not for the flag

  Of any land because myself was born there

  Will I give up my life.

  But I will love that land where man is free,

  And that will I defend.

  “To the end?” you ask, “To the end?”—Naturally, to the end.

  What is it to the world, or to me,

  That I beneath an elm, not beneath a tamarisk-tree

  First filled my lungs, and clenched my tiny hands already

  spurred and nailed

  Against the world, and wailed

  In anger and frustration that all my tricks had failed and I been

  torn

  Out of the cave where I was hiding, to suffer in the world as I

  have done and I still do—

  Never again—oh, no, no more on earth—ever again to find

  abiding-place.

  Birth—awful birth . . .

  Whatever the country, whatever the colour and race.

  The colour and the traits of each,

  The shaping of his speech,—

  These can the elm, given a long time, alter; these,

  Too, the tamarisk.

  But if he starve, but if he freeze—