Collected Poems

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

  To buy his exit from this mournful room

  These evil stains record, these walls that rise

  Carved with his torment, steamy with his sighs.

  lxxxviii

  XIX

  My most distinguished guest and learned friend,

  The pallid hare that runs before the day

  Having brought your earnest counsels to an end

  Now have I somewhat of my own to say:

  That it is folly to be sunk in love,

  And madness plain to make the matter known,

  These are no mysteries you are verger of:

  Everyman’s wisdoms these are, and my own.

  If I have flung my heart unto a hound

  I have done ill, it is a certain thing;

  Yet breathe I freer, walk I the more sound

  On my sick bones for this brave reasoning?

  Soon must I say, “’Tis prowling Death I hear!”

  Yet come no better off, for my quick ear.

  lxxxii

  XX

  Think not, nor for a moment let your mind,

  Wearied with thinking, doze upon the thought

  That the work’s done and the long day behind,

  And beauty, since ’tis paid for, can be bought .

  If in the moonlight from the silent bough

  Suddenly with precision speak your name

  The nightingale, be not assured that now

  His wing is limed and his wild virtue tame.

  Beauty beyond all feathers that have flown

  Is free; you shall not hood her to your wrist,

  Nor sting her eyes, nor have her for your own

  In any fashion; beauty billed and kissed

  Is not your turtle; tread her like a dove—

  She loves you not; she never heard of love.

  xc

  XXI

  Gone in good sooth you are: not even in dream

  You come. As if the strictures of the light,

  Laid on our glances to their disesteem,

  Extended even to shadows and the night;

  Extended even beyond that drowsy sill

  Along whose galleries open to the skies

  All maskers move unchallenged and at will,

  Visor in hand or hooded to the eyes.

  To that pavilion the green sea in flood

  Curves in, and the slow dancers dance in foam;

  I find again the pink camellia-bud

  On the wide step, beside a silver comb. . . .

  But it is scentless; up the marble stair

  I mount with pain, knowing you are not there.

  xci

  XXII

  Now by this moon, before this moon shall wane

  shall be dead or I shall be with you!

  No moral concept can outweigh the pain

  Past rack and wheel this absence puts me through;

  Faith, honour, pride, endurance, what the tongues

  Of tedious men will say, or what the law—

  For which Of these do I fill up my lungs

  With brine and fire at every breath I draw?

  Time, and to spare, for patience by and by,

  Time to be cold and time to sleep alone;

  Let me no more until the hour I die

  Defraud my innocent senses of their own.

  Before this moon shall darken, say of me:

  She’s in her grave, or where she wants to be.

  xcii

  XXIII

  I know the face of Falsehood and her tongue

  Honeyed with unction, plausible with guile,

  Are dear to men, whom count me not among,

  That owe their daily credit to her smile;

  Such have been succoured out of great distress

  By her contriving, if accounts be true:

  Their deference now above the board, I guess,

  Discharges what beneath the board is due.

  As for myself, I’d liefer lack her aid

  Than eat her presence; let this building fall:

  But let me never lift my latch, afraid

  To hear her simpering accents in the hall,

  Nor force an entrance past mephitic airs

  Of stale patchouli hanging on my stairs.

  xciii

  XXIV

  Whereas at morning in a jeweled crown

  I bit my fingers and was hard to please,

  Having shook disaster till the fruit fell down

  I feel tonight more happy and at ease:

  Feet running in the corridors, men quick-Buckling their sword-belts bumping down the stair,

  Challenge, and rattling bridge-chain, and the click

  Of hooves on pavement—this will clear the air.

  Private this chamber as it has not been

  In many a month Of muffled hours; almost,

  Lulled by the uproar, I could lie serene

  And sleep, until all’s won, until all’s lost,

  And the door’s opened and the issue shown,

  And I walk forth Hell’s mistress . . . or my own .

  xciv

  xxv

  Peril upon the paths of this desire

  Lies like the natural darkness of the night,

  For me unpeopled; let him hence retire

  Whom as a child a shadow could affright;

  And fortune speed him from this dubious place

  Where roses blenched or blackened of their hue,

  Pallid and stemless float on undulant space,

  Or clustered hidden shock the hand with dew.

  Whom as a child the night’s obscurity

  Did not alarm, let him alone remain,

  Lanterned but by the longing in the eye,

  And warmed but by the fever in the vein,

  To lie with me, sentried from wrath and scorn

  By sleepless Beauty and her polished thorn.

  xcv

  XXVI

  Women have loved before as I love now;

  At least, in lively chronicles of the past—

  Of Irish waters by a Cornish prow

  Or Trojan waters by a Spartan mast

  Much to their cost invaded—here and there,

  Hunting the amorous line, skimming the rest,

  I find some woman bearing as I bear

  Love like a burning city in the breast.

  I think however that of all alive

  I only in such utter, ancient way

  Do suffer love; in me alone survive

  The unregenerate passions of a day

  When treacherous queens, with death upon the tread,

  Heedless and wilful, took their knights to bed.

  xcvi

  XXVII

  Moon, that against the lintel of the west

  Your forehead lean until the gate be swung,

  Longing to leave the world and be at rest,

  Being worn with faring and no longer young,

  Do you recall at all the Carian hill

  Where worn with loving, loving late you lay,

  Halting the sun because you lingered still,

  While wondering candles lit the Carian day?

  Ah, if indeed this memory to your mind

  Recall some sweet employment, pity me,

  That with the dawn must leave my love behind,

  That even now the dawn’s dim herald see!

  I charge you, goddess, in the name of one

  You loved as well: endure, hold off the sun.

  xcvii

  XXVII I

  When we are old and these rejoicing veins

  Are frosty channels to a muted stream,

  And out of all our burning there remains

  No feeblest spark to fire us, even in dream,

  This be our solace: that it was not said

  When we were young and warm and in our prime,

  Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead,

  Sleeping away the unreturning time.

  O sweet, O heavy-lidded, O my love,

  When m
orning strikes her spear upon the land,

  And we must rise and arm us and reprove

  The insolent daylight with a steady hand,

  Be not discountenanced if the knowing know

  We rose from rapture but an hour ago.

  xcviii

  XXIX

  Heart, have no pity on this house of bone:

  Shake it with dancing, break it down with joy.

  No man holds mortgage on it; it is your own;

  To give, to sell at auction, to destroy.

  When you are blind to moonlight on the bed,

  When you are deaf to gravel on the pane,

  Shall quavering caution from this house instead

  Cluck forth at summer mischief in the lane?

  All that delightful youth forbears to spend

  Molestful age inherits, and the ground

  Will have us; therefore, while we’re young, my friend—

  The Latin’s vulgar, but the advice is sound.

  Youth, have no pity; leave no farthing here

  For age to invest in compromise and fear.

  xcix

  XXX

  Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

  Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;

  Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

  And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

  Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,

  Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

  Yet many a man is making friends with death

  Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

  It well may be that in a difficult hour,

  Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

  Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,

  I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

  Or trade the memory of this night for food.

  It well may be. I do not think I would.

  c

  XXXI

  When we that wore the myrtle wear the dust,

  And years of daikness cover up our eyes,

  And all our arrogant laughter and sweet lust

  Keep counsel with the scruples of the wise;

  When boys and girls that now are in the loins

  Of croaking lads, dip oar into the sea,—

  And who are these that dive for copper coins?

  No longer we, my love, no longer we—

  Then let the fortunate breathers of the air,

  When we lie speechless in the muffling mould,

  Tease not our ghosts with slander, pause not there

  To say that love is false and soon grows cold,

  But pass in silence the mute grave of two

  Who lived and died believing love was true.

  ci

  xxxii

  Time, that is pleased to lengthen out the day

  For grieving lovers parted or denied,

  And pleased to hurry the sweet hours away

  From such as lie enchanted side by side,

  Is not my kinsman; nay, my feudal foe

  Is he that in my childhood was the thief

  Of all my mother’s beauty, and in woe

  My father bowed, and brought our house to grief.

  Thus, though he think to touch with hateful frost

  Your treasured curls, and your clear forehead line,

  And so persuade me from you, he has lost;

  Never shall he inherit what was mine.

  When Time and all his tricks have done their worst,

  Still will I hold you dear, and him accurst.

  cii

  XXXIII

  Sorrowful dreams remembered after waking

  Shadow with do lout all the candid day;

  Even as I read, the silly tears out-breaking

  Splash on my hands and shut the page away. . . .

  Grief at the root, a dark and secret dolour,

  Harder to bear than wind-and-weather grief,

  Clutching the rose, draining its cheek of colour,

  Drying the bud, curling the opened leaf.

  Deep is the pond—although the edge be shallow,

  Frank in the sun, revealing fish and stone,

  Climbing ashore to turtle-head and mallow—

  Black at the centre beats a heart unknown.

  Desolate dreams pursue me out of sleep;

  Weeping I wake; waking, I weep, I weep.

  ciii

  XXXIV

  Most wicked words!-forbear to speak them out.

  Utter them not again; blaspheme no more

  Against our love with maxims learned from Doubt:

  Lest Death should get his foot inside the door.

  We are surrounded by a hundred foes;

  And he that at your bidding joins our feast,

  I stake my heart upon it, is one of those,

  Nor in their councils does he sit the least.

  Hark not his whisper: he is Time’s ally,

  Kinsman to Death, and leman of Despair:

  Believe that I shall love you till I die;

  Believe; and thrust him forth; and arm the stair;

  And top the walls with spikes and splintered glass

  That he pass gutted should again he pass.

  civ

  XXXV

  Clearly my ruined garden as it stood

  Before the frost came on it I recall—

  Stiff marigolds, and what a trunk of wood

  The zinnia had, that was the first to fall;

  These pale and oozy stalks, these hanging leaves

  Nerveless and darkened, dripping in the sun,

  Cannot gainsay me, though the spirit grieves

  And wrings its hands at what the frost has done.

  If in a widening silence you should guess

  I read the moment with recording eyes,

  Taking your love and all your loveliness

  Into a listening body hushed of sighs . . .

  Though summer’s rife and the warm rose in season,

  Rebuke me not: I have a winter reason.

  cv

  XXXVI

  Hearing your words, and not a word among them

  Tuned to my liking, on a salty day

  When inland woods were pushed by winds that flung

  them

  Hissing to leeward like a ton of spray,

  I thought how off Matinicus the tide

  Came pounding in, came running through the Gut,

  While from the Rock the warning whistle cried,

  And children whimpered, and the doors blew shut;

  There in the autumn when the men go forth,

  With slapping skirts the island women stand

  In gardens stripped and scattered, peering north,

  With dahlia tubers dripping from the hand:

  The wind of their endurance, driving south,

  Flattened your words against your speaking mouth.

  cvi

  XXXVII

  Believe, if ever the bridges of this town,

  Whose towers were builded without fault or stain,

  Be taken, and its battlements go down,

  No mortal roof shall shelter me again;

  I shall not prop a branch against a bough

  To hide me from the whipping east or north,

  Nor tease to flame a heap of sticks, who now

  Am warmed by all the wonders of the earth.

  Do you take ship unto some happier shore

  In such event, and have no thought for me,

  I shall remain;—to share the ruinous floor

  With roofs that once were seen far out at sea;

  To cheer a mouldering army on the march . . .

  And beg from spectres by a broken arch.

  cxxxvii

  XXXVII I

  You say: “Since life is cruel enough at best;”

  You say: “Considering how our love is cursed,

  And housed so bleakly that the sea-gull’s nest

  Were better shelter, even as better nu
rsed

  Between the breaker and the stingy reeds

  Ragged and coarse that hiss against the sand

  The gull’s brown chick, and hushed in all his needs,

  Than our poor love so harried through the land—

  You being too tender, even with all your scorn,

  To line his cradle with the world’s reproof,

  And I too devious, too surrendered, born

  Too far from home to hunt him even a roof

  Out of the rain— “Oh, tortured voice, be still!

  Spare me your premise: leave me when you will.

  cxviii

  XXXIX

  Love me no more, now let the god depart,

  If love be grown so bitter to your tongue!

  Here is my hand; I bid you from my heart

  Fare well, fare very well, be always young.

  As for myself, mine was a deeper drouth:

  I drank and thirsted still; but I surmise

  My kisses now are sand against your mouth,

  Teeth in your palm and pennies on your eyes.

  Speak but one cruel word, to shame my tears;

  Go, but in going, stiffen up my back

  To meet the yelping of the mustering years—

  Dim, trotting shapes that seldom will attack

  Two with a light who match their steps and sing:

  To one alone and lost, another thing.

  cix

  XL

  You loved me not at all, but let it go;

  I loved you more than life, but let it be.

  As the more injured party, this being so,

  The hour’s amenities are all to me—

  The choice of weapons; and I gravely choose

  To let the weapons tarnish where they lie;

  And spend the night in eloquent abuse

  Of senators and popes and such small fry

  And meet the morning standing, and at odds

  With heaven and earth and hell and any fool

  Who calls his soul his own, and all the gods,

  And all the children getting dressed for school . . .

  And you will leave me, and I shall entomb

  What’s cold by then in an adjoining room.

  cx

  XLI

  I said in the beginning, did I not?—

  Prophetic of the end, though unaware

  How light you took me, ignorant that you thought