Collected Poems

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Our colours are as clouds before the wind;

  Yet for a moment stood the foe forsaken,

  Eyeing Love’s favour to our helmet pinned;

  Death is our master,—but his seat is shaken;

  He rides victorious,—but his ranks are thinned.

  lxvi

  Sonnet to Gath

  Country of hunchbacks!—where the strong, straight

  spine,

  Jeered at by crooked children, makes his way

  Through by-streets at the kindest hour of day,

  Till he deplore his stature, and incline

  To measure manhood with a gibbous line;

  Till out of loneliness, being flawed with clay,

  He stoop into his neighbour’s house and say,

  “Your roof is low for me—the fault is mine. ”

  Dust in an urn long since, dispersed and dead

  Is great Apollo; and the happier he;

  Since who amongst you all would lift a head

  At a god’s radiance on the mean door-tree,

  Saving to run and hide your dates and bread,

  And cluck your children in about your knee?

  lxvii

  To Inez Milholland

  Read in Washington, November eighteenth, 1923, at the unveiling

  of a statue of three leaders in the cause of Equal Rights (or Women

  Upon this marble bust that is not I

  Lay the round, formal wreath that is not fame;

  But in the forum Of my silenced cry

  Root ye the living tree whose sap is flame.

  I, that was proud and valiant, am no more;—

  Save as a dream that wanders wide and late,

  Save as a wind that rattles the stout door,

  Troubling the ashes in the sheltered grate.

  The stone will perish; I shall be twice dust.

  Only my standard on a taken hill

  Can cheat the mildew and the red-brown rust

  And make immortal my adventurous will.

  Even now the silk is tugging at the staff:

  Take up the song; forget the epitaph.

  lxvii

  To Jesus on His Birthday

  For this your mother sweated in the cold,

  For this you bled upon the bitter tree:

  A yard of tinsel ribbon bought and sold;

  A paper wreath; a day at home for me .

  The merry bells ring out, the people kneel;

  Up goes the man of God before the crowd;

  With voice of honey and with eyes of steel

  He drones your humble gospel to the proud .

  Nobody listens. Less than the wind that blows

  Are all your words to us you died to save.

  O Prince of Peace! O Sharon’s dewy Rose!

  How mute you lie within your vaulted grave.

  The stone the angel rolled away with tears

  Is back upon your mouth these thousand years.

  lxix

  On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven

  Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease!

  Reject me not into the world again.

  With you alone is excellence and peace,

  Mankind made plausible, his purpose plain.

  Enchanted in your air benign and shrewd,

  With limbs a-sprawl and empty faces pale,

  The spiteful and the stingy and the rude

  Sleep like the scullions in the fairy-tale.

  This moment is the best the world can give:

  The tranquil blossom on the tortured stem.

  Reject me not, sweet sounds! oh, let me live,

  Till Doom espy my towers and scatter them,

  A city spell-bound under the aging sun,

  Music my rampart, and my only One.

  Fatal Interview

  lxx

  Fatal Interview

  What thing is this that, built of salt and lime

  And such dry motes as in the sunbeam show,

  Has power upon me that do daily climb

  The dustless air?—for whom those peaks of snow

  Where up the lungs Of man with borrowed breath

  Go labouring to a doom I may not feel,

  Are but a pearled and roseate plain beneath

  My winged helmet and my winged heel.

  What sweet emotions neither foe nor friend

  Are these that clog my flight? what thing is this

  That hastening headlong to a dusty end

  Dare turn upon me these proud eyes of bliss?

  Up, up, my feathers!—ere I lay you by

  To journey barefoot with a mortal joy.

  lxxii

  II

  This beast that rends me in the sight of all,

  This love, this longing, this oblivious thing,

  That has me under as the last leaves fall,

  Will glut, will sicken, will be gone by spring.

  The wound will heal, the fever will abate,

  The knotted hurt will slacken in the breast;

  I shall forget before the flickers mate

  Your look that is today my east and west.

  Unscathed, however, from a claw so deep

  Though I should love again I shall not go:

  Along my body, waking while I sleep,

  Sharp to the kiss, cold to the hand as snow,

  The scar of this encounter like a sword

  Will lie between me and my troubled lord.

  lxxii

  III

  No lack Of counsel from the shrewd and wise

  How love may be acquired and how conserved

  Warrants this laying bare before your eyes

  My needle to your north abruptly swerved;

  If I would hold you, I must hide my fears

  Lest you be wanton, lead you to believe

  My compass to another quarter veers,

  Little surrender, lavishly receive.

  But being like my mother the brown earth

  Fervent and full Of gifts and free from guile,

  Liefer would I you loved me for my worth,

  Though you should love me but a little while,

  Than for a philtre any doll can brew,—

  Though thus I bound you as I long to do.

  lxxiii

  IV

  Nay, learned doctor, these fine leeches fresh

  From the pond’s edge my cause cannot remove:

  Alas, the sick disorder in my flesh

  Is deeper than your skill, is very love.

  And you, good friar, far liefer would I think

  Upon my dear, and dream him in your place,

  Than heed your ben’cites and heavenward sink

  With empty heart and noddle full of grace.

  Breathes but one mortal on the teeming globe

  Could minister to my soul’s or body’s needs—

  Physician minus physic, minus robe;

  Confessor minus Latin, minus beads.

  Yet should you bid me name him, I am dumb;

  For though you summon him, he would not come.

  lxxiv

  v

  Of all that ever in extreme disease

  “Sweet Love, sweet cruel Love, have pity!” cried,

  Count me the humblest, hold me least of these

  That wear the red heart crumpled in the side,

  In heaviest durance, dreaming or awake,

  Filling the dungeon with their piteous woe;

  Not that I shriek not till the dungeon shake,

  “Oh, God! Oh, let me out! Oh, let me go!”

  But that my chains throughout their iron length

  Make such a golden clank upon my ear,

  But that I would not, boasted I the strength,

  Up with a terrible arm and out of here

  Where thrusts my morsel daily through the bars

  This tall, oblivious gaoler eyed with stars.

  lxxv

  VI

  Since I cannot persuade you from this mood

&
nbsp; Of pale preoccupation with the dead,

  Not for my comfort nor for your own good

  Shift your concern to living bones instead;

  Since that which Helen did and ended Troy

  Is more than I can do though I be warm,

  Have up your buried girls, egregious boy,

  And stand with them against the unburied storm.

  When you lie wasted and your blood runs thin,

  And what’s to do must with dispatch be done,

  Call Cressid, call Elaine, call Isolt in!—

  More bland the ichor of a ghost should run

  Along your dubious veins than the rude sea

  Of passion pounding all day long in me.

  lxxvi

  VII

  Night is my sister, and how deep in love,

  How drowned in love and weedily washed ashore,

  There to be fretted by the drag and shove

  At the tide’s edge, I lie—these things and more:

  Whose arm alone between me and the sand,

  Whose voice alone, whose pitiful breath brought near,

  Could thaw these nostrils and unlock this hand,

  She could advise you, should you care to hear.

  Small chance, however, in a storm so black,

  A man will leave his friendly fire and snug

  For a drowned woman’s sake, and bring her back

  To drip and scatter shells upon the rug.

  No one but Night, with tears on her dark face,

  Watches beside me in this windy place.

  lxxvii

  VIII

  Yet in an hour to come, disdainful dust,

  You shall be bowed and brought to bed with me .

  While the blood roars, or when the blood is rust

  About a broken engine, this shall be.

  If not today, then later; if not here

  On the green grass, with sighing and delight,

  Then under it, all in good time, my dear,

  We shall be laid together in the night.

  And ruder and more violent, be assured,

  Than the desirous body’s heat and sweat

  That shameful kiss by more than night obscured

  Wherewith at length the scornfullest mouth is met .

  Life has no friend; her converts late or soon

  Slide back to feed the dragon with the moon .

  lxxviii

  IX

  When you are dead, and your disturbing eyes

  No more as now their stormy lashes lift

  To lance me through—as in the morning skies

  One moment, plainly visible in a rift

  Of cloud, two splendid planets may appear

  And purely blaze, and are at once withdrawn,

  What time the watcher in desire and fear

  Leans from his chilly window in the dawn—

  Shall I be free, shall I be once again

  As others are, and count your loss no care?

  Oh, never more, till my dissolving brain

  Be powerless to evoke you out of air,

  Remembered morning stars, more fiercely bright

  Than all the Alphas of the actual night!

  lxxix

  x

  Strange thing that I, by nature nothing prone

  To fret the summer blossom on its stem,

  Who know the hidden nest, but leave alone

  The magic eggs, the bird that cuddles them,

  Should have no peace till your bewildered heart

  Hung fluttering at the window of my breast,

  Till I had ravished to my bitter smart

  Your kiss from the stern moment, could not rest.

  “Swift wing, sweet blossom, live again in air!

  Depart, poor flower; poor feathers you are free! ”

  Thus do I cry, being teased by shame and care

  That beauty should be brought to terms by me;

  Yet shamed the more that in my heart I know,

  Cry as I may, I could not let you go.

  lxxx

  XI

  Not in a silver casket cool with pearls

  Or rich with red corundum or with blue,

  Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls

  Have given their loves, I give my love to you;

  Not in a lovers’-knot, not in a ring

  Worked in such fashion, and the legend plain—

  Semper fidelis, where a secret spring

  Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain:

  Love in the open hand, no thing but that,

  Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,

  As one should bring you cowslips in a hat

  Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,

  I bring you, calling out as children do:

  “Look what I have!—-And these are all for you.”

  lxxxi

  XII

  Olympian gods, mark now my bedside lamp

  Blown out; and be advised too late that he

  Whom you call sire is stolen into the camp

  Of warring Earth, and lies abed with me .

  Call out your golden hordes, the harm is done:

  Enraptured in his great embrace I lie;

  Shake heaven with spears, but I shall bear a son

  Branded with godhead, heel and brow and thigh.

  Whom think not to bedazzle or confound

  With meteoric splendours or display

  Of blackened moons or suns or the big sound

  Of sudden thunder on a silent day;

  Pain and compassion shall he know, being mine,—

  Confusion never, that is half divine.

  lxxxii

  XIII

  I said, seeing how the winter gale increased,

  Even as waxed within us and grew strong

  The ancient tempest of desire, “At least,

  It is the season when the nights are long.

  Well flown, well shattered from the summer hedge

  The early sparrow and the opening flowers!—

  Late climbs the sun above the southerly edge

  These days, and sweet to love those added hours. ”

  Alas, already does the dark recede,

  And visible are the trees against the snow.

  Oh, monstrous parting, oh, perfidious deed,

  How shall I leave your side, how shall I go? . . .

  Unnatural night, the shortest of the year,

  Farewell! ’Tis dawn. The longest day is here.

  lxxxiii

  XIV

  Since of no creature living the last breath

  Is twice required, or twice the ultimate pain,

  Seeing how to quit your arms is very death,

  ’Tis likely that I shall not die again;

  And likely ’tis that Time whose gross decree

  Sends now the dawn to clamour at our door,

  Thus having done his evil worst to me,

  Will thrust me by, will harry me no more.

  When you are corn and roses and at rest

  I shall endure, a dense and sanguine ghost,

  To haunt the scene where I was happiest,

  To bend above the thing I loved the most;

  And rise, and wring my hands, and steal away

  As I do now, before the advancing day.

  lxxxii

  XV

  My worship from this hour the Sparrow-Drawn

  Alone will cherish, and her arrowy child,

  Whose groves alone in the inquiring dawn

  Rise tranquil, and their altars undefiled.

  Seaward and shoreward smokes a plundered land

  To guard whose portals was my dear employ;

  Razed are its temples now; inviolate stand

  Only the slopes of Venus and her boy.

  How have I stripped me of immortal aid

  Save theirs alone,—who could endure to see

  Forsworn Aeneas with conspiring blade

  Sever the ship from shore (alas for me )

&nb
sp; And make no sign; who saw, and did not speak,

  The brooch of Troilus pinned upon the Greek.

  lxxxi

  XVI

  I dreamed I moved among the Elysian fields,

  In converse with sweet women long since dead;

  And out of blossoms which that meadow yields

  I wove a garland for your living head.

  Danae, that was the vessel for a day

  Of golden Jove, I saw, and at her side,

  Whom Jove the Bull desired and bore away,

  Europa stood, and the Swan’s featherless bride.

  All these were mortal women, yet all these

  Above the ground had had a god for guest;

  Freely I walked beside them and at ease,

  Addressing them, by them again addressed,

  And marvelled nothing, for remembering you,

  Wherefore I was among them well I knew.

  lxxxvi

  XVII

  Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart

  I took your thrust, whereby I since am slain,

  And lie disheveled in the grass apart,

  A sodden thing bedrenched by tears and rain,

  While rainy evening drips to misty night,

  And misty night to cloudy morning clears,

  And clouds disperse across the gathering light,

  And birds grow noisy, and the sun appears—

  Had I bethought me then, sweet love, sweet thorn,

  How sharp an anguish even at the best,

  When all’s requited and the future sworn,

  The happy hour can leave within the breast,

  I had not so come running at the call

  Of one who loves me little, if at all.

  lxxxvii

  XVIII

  Shall I be prisoner till my pulses stop

  To hateful Love and drag his noisy chain,

  And bait my need with sugared crusts that drop

  From jeweled fingers neither kind nor clean?—

  Mewed in an airless cavern where a toad

  Would grieve to snap his gnat and lay him down,

  While in the light along the rattling road

  Men shout and chaff and drive their wares to town?.. .

  Perfidious Prince, that keep me here confined,

  Doubt not I know the letters of my doom:

  How many a man has left his blood behind