Collected Poems

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

The questioning mind of Man . . . that by and by

  From the void’s rim returns with swooning eye,

  Having seen himself into the maelstrom spill.

  O race of Adam, blench not lest you find

  In the sun’s bubbling bowl anonymous death,

  Or lost in whistling space without a mind

  To monstrous Nothing yield your little breath:

  You shall achieve destruction where you stand,

  In intimate conflict, at your brother’s hand.

  clvi

  XVI

  Alas for Man, so stealthily betrayed,

  Bearing the bad cell in him from the start,

  Pumping and feeding from his healthy heart

  That wild disorder never to be stayed

  When once established, destined to invade

  With angry hordes the true and proper part,

  Till Reason joggles in the headsman’s cart,

  And Mania spits from every balustrade.

  Would he had searched his closet for his bane,

  Where lurked the trusted ancient of his soul,

  Obsequious Greed, and seen that visage plain;

  Would he had whittled treason from his side

  In his stout youth and bled his body whole,

  Then had he died a king, or never died.

  clvii

  XVII

  Only the diamond and the diamond’s dust

  Can render up the diamond unto Man;

  One and invulnerable as it began

  Had it endured, but for the treacherous thrust

  That laid its hard heart open, as it must,

  And ground it down and fitted it to span

  A turbaned brow or fret an ivory fan,

  Lopped of its stature, pared of its proper crust.

  So Man, by all the wheels of heaven unscored,

  Man, the stout ego, the exuberant mind

  No edge could cleave, no acid could consume,—

  Being split along the vein by his own kind,

  Gives over, rolls upon the palm abhorred,

  Is set in brass on the swart thumb of Doom .

  clviii

  XVII I

  Here lies, and none to mourn him but the sea,

  That falls incessant on the empty shore,

  Most various Man, cut down to spring no more;

  Before his prime, even in his infancy

  Cut down, and all the clamour that was he,

  Silenced; and all the riveted pride he wore,

  A rusted iron column whose tall core

  The rains have tunnelled like an aspen tree.

  Man, doughty Man, what power has brought you low,

  That heaven itself in arms could not persuade

  To lay aside the lever and the spade

  And be as dust among the dusts that blow?

  Whence, whence the broadside? whose the heavy

  blade? . . .

  Strive not to speak, poor scattered mouth; I know.

  FINIS

  From Mine the Harvest

  clix

  Those hours when happy hours were my estate,—

  Entailed, as proper, for the next in line,

  Yet mine the harvest, and the title mine—

  Those acres, fertile, and the furrow straight,

  From which the lark would rise—all of my late

  Enchantments, still, in brilliant colours, shine,

  But striped with black, the tulip, lawn and vine,

  Like gardens looked at through an iron gate.

  Yet not as one who never sojourned there

  I view the lovely segments of a past

  I lived with all my senses, well aware

  That this was perfect, and it would not last:

  I smell the flower, though vacuum-still the air;

  I feel its texture, though the gate is fast.

  clx

  Not, to me, less lavish—though my dreams have been

  splendid—

  Than dreams, have been the hours of the actual day:

  Never, awaking, did I awake to say:

  “Nothing could be like that,” when a dream was ended.

  Colours, in dream; ecstasy, in dream extended

  Beyond the edge of sleep—these, in their way,

  Approach, come even close, yet pause, yet stay,

  In the high presence of request by its answer attended.

  Music, and painting, poetry, love, and grief,

  Had they been more intense, I could not have borne,—

  Yet, not, I think, through stout endurance lacked;

  Rather, because the budding and the falling leaf

  Were one, and wonderful,—not to be torn

  Apart: I ask of dream: seem like the fact.

  clxi

  Tranquility at length, when autumn comes,

  Will lie upon the spirit like that haze

  Touching far islands on fine autumn days

  With tenderest blue, like bloom on purple plums;

  Harvest will ring, but not as summer hums,

  With noisy enterprise—to broaden, raise,

  Proceed, proclaim, establish: autumn stays

  The marching year one moment; stills the drums.

  Then sits the insistent cricket in the grass;

  But on the gravel crawls the chilly bee;

  And all is over that could come to pass

  Last year; excepting this: the mind is free

  One moment, to compute, refute, amass,

  Catalogue, question, contemplate, and see.

  clxii

  Sonnet in Dialectic

  And is indeed truth beauty?—at the cost

  Of all else that we cared for, can this be?—

  To see the coarse triumphant, and to see

  Honour and pity ridiculed, and tossed

  Upon a poked-at fire; all courage lost

  Save what is whelped and fattened by decree

  To move among the unsuspecting free

  And trap the thoughtful, with their thoughts engrossed?

  Drag yet that stream for Beauty, if you will;

  And find her, if you can; finding her drowned

  Will not dismay your ethics,—you will still

  To one and all insist she has been found . . .

  And haggard men will smile your praise, until,

  Some day, they stumble on her burial-mound.

  clxiii

  To hold secure the province of Pure Art,—

  What if the crude and weighty task were mine?—

  For him who runs, cutting the pen less fine

  Than formerly, and in the indignant heart

  Dipping it straight? (to issue thence a dart,

  And shine no more except as weapons shine)

  The deeply-loved, the laboured, polished line

  Eschew for ever?—this to be my part?

  Attacked that Temple is which must not fall—

  Under whose ancient shade Calliope,

  Thalia, Euterpe, the nine Muses all

  Went once about their happy business free:

  Could I but write the Writing on the Wall! —

  What matter, if one poet cease to be.

  clxiv

  And if I die, because that part of me

  Which part alone of me had chance to live,

  Chose to be honour’s threshing-floor, a sieve

  Where right through wrong might make its way, and

  If from all taint of indignation, free

  Must be my art, and thereby fugitive

  From all that threatens it—why—let me give

  To moles my dubious immortality.

  For, should I cancel by one passionate screed

  All that in chaste reflection I have writ,

  So that again not ever in bright need

  A man shall want my verse and reach for it,

  I and my verses will be dead indeed,—

  That which we died to champion, hurt no whit.

  clxv

&nbs
p; It is the fashion now to wave aside

  As tedious, obvious, vacuous, trivial, trite,

  All things which do not tickle, tease, excite

  To some subversion, or in verbiage hide

  Intent, or mock, or with hot sauce provide

  A dish to prick the thickened appetite;

  Straightforwardness is wrong, evasion right;

  It is correct, de rigueur, to deride.

  What fumy wits these modern wags expose,

  For all their versatility: Voltaire,

  Who wore to bed a night-cap, and would close,

  In fear of drafts, all windows, could declare

  In antique stuffiness, a phrase that blows

  Still through men’s smoky minds, and clears the air.

  clxvi

  Alcestis to her husband, just before,

  with his tearful approbation, she dies

  in order that he may live.

  Admetus, from my marrow’s core I do

  Despise you: wherefore pity not your wife,

  Who, having seen expire her love for you

  With heaviest grief, today gives up her life.

  You could not with your mind imagine this:

  One might surrender, yet continue proud.

  Not having loved, you do not know : the kiss

  You sadly beg, is impious, not allowed.

  Of all I loved,—how many girls and men

  Have loved me in return?—speak!—young or old—

  Speak!—sleek or famished, can you find me then

  One form would flank me, as this night grows cold?

  I am at peace, Admetus—go and slake

  Your grief with wine. I die for my own sake.

  clxvii

  What chores these churls do put upon the great,

  What chains, what harness; the unfettered mind,

  At dawn, in all directions flying blind

  Yet certain, might accomplish, might create

  What all men must consult or contemplate,—

  Save that the spirit, earth-born and born kind,

  Cannot forget small questions left behind,

  Nor honest human impulse underrate:

  Oh, how the speaking pen has been impeded,

  To its own cost and to the cost of speech,

  By specious hands that for some thinly-needed

  Answer or autograph, would claw a breach

  In perfect thought . . . till broken thought receded

  And ebbed in foam, like ocean down a beach.

  clxviii

  I will put Chaos into fourteen lines

  And keep him there; and let him thence escape

  If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape

  Flood, fire, and demon—his adroit designs

  Will strain to nothing in the strict confines

  Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,

  I hold his essence and amorphous shape,

  Till he with Order mingles and combines.

  Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,

  His arrogance, our awful servitude:

  I have him. He is nothing more nor less

  Than something simple not yet understood;

  I shall not even force him to confess;

  Or answer. I will only make him good.

  clxix

  Come home, victorious wounded!—let the dead,

  The out-of-it, the more victorious still,

  Hold in the cold the hot-contested hill,

  Hold by the sand the abandoned smooth beach-head;—

  Maimed men, whose scars must be exhibited

  To all the world, though much against your will—

  And men whose bodies bear no marks of ill,

  Being twisted only in the guts and head:

  Come home! come home!—not to the home you long

  To find, —and which your valour had achieved

  Had virtue been but right, and evil wrong!—

  We have tried hard, and we have greatly grieved:

  Come home and help us!—you are hurt but strong!

  —And we—we are bewildered—and bereaved.

  clxx

  Read history: so learn your place in Time;

  And go to sleep: all this was done before;

  We do it better, fouling every shore;

  We disinfect, we do not probe, the crime.

  Our engines plunge into the seas, they climb

  Above our atmosphere: we grow not more

  Profound as we approach the ocean’s floor;

  Our flight is lofty, it is not sublime.

  Yet long ago this Earth by struggling men

  Was scuffed, was scraped by mouths that bubbled mud;

  And will be so again, and yet again;

  Until we trace our poison to its bud

  And root, and there uproot it: until then,

  Earth will be warmed each winter by man’s blood.

  clxxi

  Read history: thus learn how small a space

  You may inhabit, nor inhabit long

  In crowding Cosmos—in that confined place

  Work boldly; build your flimsy barriers strong;

  Turn round and round, make warm your nest; among

  The other hunting beasts, keep heart and face,—

  Not to betray the doomed and splendid race

  You are so proud of, to which you belong.

  For trouble comes to all of us: the rat

  Has courage, in adversity, to fight;

  But what a shining animal is man,

  Who knows, when pain subsides, that is not that,

  For worse than that must follow—yet can write

  Music; can laugh; play tennis; even plan.

  clxxii

  My words that once were virtuous and expressed

  Nearly enough the mortal joys I knew,

  Now that I sit to supper with the blest

  Come haltingly, are very poor and few.

  Whereof you speak and wherefore the bright walls

  Resound with silver mirth I am aware,

  But I am faint beneath the coronals

  Of living vines you set upon my hair.

  Angelic friends that stand with pointed wings

  Sweetly demanding, in what dulcet tone,

  How fare I in this heaven of happy things,—

  I cannot lift my words against your own.

  Forgive the downcast look, the lyre unstrung;

  Breathing your presence, I forget your tongue.

  clxxiii

  Now sits the autumn cricket in the grass,

  And on the gravel crawls the chilly bee;

  Near to its close and none too soon for me

  Draws the dull year, in which has come to pass

  The changing of the happy child I was

  Into this quiet creature people see

  Stitching a seam with careful industry

  To deaden you, who died on Michaelmas.

  Ages ago the purple aconite

  Laid its dark hoods about it on the ground,

  And roses budded small and were content;

  Swallows are south long since and out of sight;

  With you the phlox and asters also went;

  Nor can my laughter anywhere be found.

  clxxiv

  And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you

  All through my life?—sharing my fire, my bed,

  Sharing—oh, worst of all things!—the same head?—

  And, when I feed myself, feeding you, too?

  So be it, then, if what seems true, is true:

  Let us to dinner, comrade, and be fed;—

  I cannot die till you yourself are dead,

  And, with you living, I can live life through.

  Yet have you done me harm, ungracious guest,

  Spying upon my ardent offices

  With frosty look; robbing my nights of rest;

  And making harder things I did with ease.

  You will die with me : but I shall,
at best,

  Forgive you with restraint, for deeds like these.

  clxxv

  If I die solvent—die, that is to say,

  In full possession of my critical mind,

  Not having cast, to keep the wolves at bay

  In this dark wood—till all be flung behind—

  Wit, courage, honour, pride, oblivion

  Of the red eyeball and the yellow tooth;

  Nor sweat nor howl nor break into a run

  When loping Death’s upon me in hot sooth;

  ’Twill be that in my honoured hands I bear

  What’s under no condition to be spilled

  Till my blood spills and hardens in the air:

  An earthen grail, a humble vessel filled

  To its low brim with water from that brink

  Where Shakespeare, Keats and Chaucer learned to drink.

  clxxvi

  Grief that is grief and properly so hight

  Has lodging in the orphaned brain alone,

  Whose nest is cold, whose wings are now his own

  And thinly feathered for the perchless flight

  Between the owl and ermine; overnight

  His food is reason, fodder for the grown,

  His range is north to famine, south to fright.

  When Constant Care was manna to the beak,

  And Love Triumphant downed the hovering breast,

  Vainly the cuckoo’s child might nudge and speak

  In ugly whispers to the indignant nest:

  How even a feathered heart had power to break,

  And thud no more above their huddled rest.

  clxxvii

  Felicity of Grief!—even Death being kind,

  Reminding us how much we dared to love!

  There, once, the challenge lay,—like a light glove

  Dropped as through carelessness—easy to find

  Means and excuse for being somewhat blind

  Just at that moment; and why bend above,

  Take up, such certain anguish for the mind?

  Ah, you who suffer now as I now do,

  Seeing, of Life’s dimensions, not one left

  Save Time—long days somehow to be lived through:

  Think—Of how great a thing were you bereft

  That it should weigh so now!—and that you knew

  Always, its awkward contours, and its heft.