Collected Poems
Page 33
Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.
Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Color seen in leaf of apple,
Bark of popple.
But Millay missed the sea, and in 1933 she and Eugen bought Ragged Island, a small property off the coast of Maine that soon became her sanctuary from the pressures and demands of literary fame. Her moments of solitude there also inspired new poems: “There, thought unbraids itself, and the mind becomes single. / There you row with tranquil oars, and the ocean / Shows no scars from the cutting of your placid keel; / Care becomes senseless there; pride and promotion / Remote; you only look; you scarcely feel.”
Millay felt a strong affinity for the Romantic poets, identifying with their reverence for nature and unwavering belief in the individual. She also shared their fascination for fantasy and the supernatural, manifested in her own array of strange characters with mysterious origins. In “The Singing-Woman from the Wood’s Edge,” a part-human, part-sylvan being narrates her life story in a lilting voice: “Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water, / What should I be but the fiend’s god-daughter? / And who should be my playmates but the adder and the frog, / That was got beneath a furze-bush and born in a bog?” In “Wraith,” a ghostly visitor, “thin as thread, with exquisite fingers” and “glimmering eyes,” haunts the poet’s house, rattling the windows and doors. Another specter, “The Little Ghost,” dressed in a flowing white gown, ruffled white hat, and lacy gloves, returns to visit her garden and, finding it tended by the poet, smiles with approval before disappearing through “a gate that once was there.”
Nature takes center stage in one of Millay’s finest works, a seventeen-sonnet sequence titled Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree, based on a true story told to Millay by her mother. A New England farm wife, having left an unfulfilling marriage, returns to her husband’s side many years later to care for him on his deathbed, “loving him not at all.” As the sequence progresses, the mood of suspense and spiritual heaviness magnifies the wife’s taut emotional state. Nature images—earth, air, water, trees, and birds—comprise a physical world to which the woman is closely bound, while her imagination and dreams create an equally lush but terrifying mental landscape.
Tense and fearful in “the presence of death,” she sees her past in “the painted butter-tub . . ., / Where once her red geraniums had stood,” and recalls how, as a young, hopeful wife, she had planted seeds, “musing ahead to their far blossoming.” Now, her senses heightened, rain drumming “steady” on the roof, her heart beating “like a frightened partridge,” she feels trapped by her husband’s eerily silent presence, waiting for his death to set her free.
In a series of flashbacks, the woman revisits their courtship, recalling “the August night / . . . level as a lake beneath the moon” when, “her body sluggish with desire,” she believed “the boy, who was at noon /.. . not different from the rest” might be “her spirit’s mate.” Millay’s sinister natural imagery foreshadows the doomed relationship ahead: “Stark on the open field the moonlight fell, / But the oak tree’s shadow was deep and black and secret as a well.”
The woman’s “horror he would die at night” dissipates as her husband slips away and she begins to imagine hi m as an inanimate object, like a “mute clock, maintaining ever the same / Dead moment.” Though “from his desirous body the great heat /
Was gone at last,” her own life is about to be renewed: “It struck her .. . I That here was spring, and the whole year to be lived through once more.”
In Fatal Interview, a sequence of fifty-two sonnets, the changing seasons serve as a timepiece for the life cycle of a failed love affair and the framework for a narrative structure that references the Greek myth of Endymion and Selene the Moon Goddess. This sequence was inspired by Millay’s love affair with George Dillon, a twenty-one-year-old aspiring poet she met in Chicago in 1928 on one of her national reading tours. Their relationship fueled Millay’s poetry but strained her marriage: “The scar of this encounter like a sword / Will lie between me and my troubled lord.”
The poet’s passionate encounter—the “fatal interview”—leaves her grappling with feelings of rejection and despair when her lover loses interest. Like the goddess Selene, who fell hopelessly in love with the sleeping shepherd boy Endymion, the poet desires the “unconscious man,” though she knows he cannot satisfy her needs. Throughout the sequence, Millay reverses the gender roles found in traditional love poetry by portraying the female lover as desirous and the ma n as unattainable. The poet finally finds .comfort in the female forces of nature, citing the integrity of her own natural heritage, her “mother the brown earth / Fervent and full of gifts and free from guile.” When the ma n refuses to acknowledge the pain he has caused her, she turns to nature for protection: “Night is my sister,.. . I.. . I No one but Night with tears on her dark face, / Watches beside me in this windy place.” Finally, she beckons a third female ally, Beauty, to keep her safe from “wrath and scorn.” Unlike Selene, the poet need not go mad with longing for an unresponsive lover; instead, flanked by Night and Beauty, she declares that she will “love again.”
Millay’s metaphor for the thwarted love affair is the destruction of a flower garden after the first frost. Though her “spirit grieves / And wrings its hands at what the frost has done,” the grotesque images of dead plants—“these pale and oozy stalks, these hanging leaves / Nerveless and darkened, dripping in the sun”—cannot deny her the joyous memory of their former glory: “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 . . .” Similarly, the poet, having survived the loss of her lover by acknowledging that her primary, archetypal bond is with nature and not another human being, can look back and savor the memories of her “summer” love affair.
Edna St. Vincent Millay lived and wrote at Steepletop for twenty-five years. In 1950, the last year of her life, mourning the recent loss of her beloved Eugen, she chose to remain there alone, relying on the familiar scenes and cycles of nature to inspire, ground, and calm her. Still, she felt “scared the way [she] used to be as a child” as she imagined life without him. “I am exploring strange and uncharted country,” she wrote to a friend. “I am the first one that ever lost Eugen.”
Among the unfinished poems found in Millay’s notebooks after her death were three penciled lines she had circled, as if to remind herself that even in grief, the natural world must be held in the highest esteem:
I will control myself, or go inside. I will not flaw perfection with my grief. Handsome, this day: no matter who has died.
About the author
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Preface to
Distressing Dialogues
by Nancy Boyd (her pen name)
Miss BOYD HAS ASKED ME to write a preface to these dialogues, with which, having followed them eagerly as they appeared from time to time in the pages of Vanity Fair, I was already familiar. I am no friend of prefaces, but if there must be one to this book, it should come from me, who was its author’s earliest admirer. I take pleasure in recommending to the public these excellent small satires, from the pen of one in whose work I have a never-failing interest and delight.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Tokyo, May 6,1924
A Selection of Letters
All excerpts from Millay’s letters are taken from Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited by Allan Ross Macdougall (Camden, Maine: Down East Books, 1952).
To the Millay Family
135 East 52nd Street
New York City
Tuesday Morning
[April 8,1913]
Dearest Darlings—
I just this minute got a check for twenty-five dollars from Mitchell Kennerly for two little poems I sent him. I am going to indorse it and send it home after I’ve looked at it a little while. He says “I am delighted to have them and sha
ll print them in early numbers of the Forum. I should like to talk to you about your work, and hope you will come and see me.”
Have just got a letter from some of you but haven’t had the time to read it.
O, Mother and girls!
—Vincent
To Norma Millay
New York
Sunday
[June 1917]
Dear Norma,—
Tell Mother it is all right,—the class made such a fuss that they let me come back, & I graduated [from Vassar] in my cap & gown along with the rest. Tell her it had nothing to do with money;—all my bills have been settled for some time.— Commencement went off beautifully & I had a wonderful time. Tell her this at once if you can. I didn’t get the Milwaukee season, so I’m staying here 8c just looking around for a job. If I get one soon enough, & it doesn’t begin for a short time perhaps I shall come home when [younger sister] Kathleen does, but otherwise I shall just stay on here until I get something to do, probably. You see I have to start right in working as soon as I can get a job,—& I may not be able to come home at all. We mustn’t be foolish about these things.
I have sold October-November to The Yale Review, a fine magazine.
If I got an engagement for the fall then I could come home & do some writing, which I am very anxious to do, this summer. But I can’t come home unless I have something sure here to come back to,—you understand.
I am feeling much rested,—& all keyed up to go to work—but, oh, I am so homesick to see you, dear, & Mother,—& the garden & everything!—Never mind, if I have good luck I shall come home,— unless I have to begin work at once.
Please write my darling, darling, darling, sister.
Vincent
(Edna St. Vincent Millay A.B.!)
To Harriet Monroe
139 Waverly Place,
New York City.
March 1st, 1918
Dear Harriet Monroe,—
Spring is here,—and I could be very happy, except that I am broke. Would you mind paying me now instead of on publication for those so stunning verses of mine which you have? I am become very, very thin, and have taken to smoking Virginia tobacco.
Wistfully yours,
Edna St. Vincent Millay
P.S. I am awfully broke. Would you mind paying me a lot?
To Arthur Davison Ficke
[October 24,1930]
Dearest Artie:
It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another—it’s one dam n thing over & over—there’s the rub—first you get sick—then you get sicker—then you get not quite so sick—then you get hardly sick at all—then you get a little sicker— then you get a lost sicker—then you get not quite so sick—oh, hell
Love from
Little Wince.
To Eugen Jan Boissevain
Chicago & Northeastern Station 10:25 A.M. Wednesday [January, 1924]
Darling:—
It’s wonderful to write to you, my dearest. It takes the sting out of almost anything, I find. I wanted you so last night. I was pretty unhappy. And of course I was tired too.—I had to get up early this morning, because I made a sudden decision to check out of the Hotel Windermere .. . so I had to pack .. . & I had to take a 10:30 train.
It’s amusing to think how entirely, totally, ABSOLUTELY different everything would be if you were in this chair beside me.—It makes me laugh, it’s so funny that there could be such a difference. Oh, it will be so lovely when we go around the earth together!—I told some people that we are going to Java & China in March.—Why not?—For we are, we are! —Aren’t we?
There’s a man getting off at this [train] station. .. . The porter just brushed him off, standing just in front of me. This is the porter’s little trick. He brushes the dust from the man getting off at this station, onto the man getting off at the next station,—& business flourishes.—Well, darling, I have poured out all my troubles.—none of them matters, when I think of you.—
Edna.
To Cass Canfield
Steepletop, Austerlitz, N.Y. May 10th, 1948
Dear Cass:
Enclosed is a copy of my letter to Arthur Rushmore, in reply to his of several weeks ago. I cannot do what he suggests. So, once again, Harper’s makes me a proposition which I must turn down. I feel very bad about it, always turning you down.
I think it only fair to tell you, fair to my publishers and to myself, that if only you and Rushmore and all the rest of you nice people down there at Harper’s, would just for a little while stop nagging me, I might be able to get some work done. It is perfectly natural and understandable that you should try to think up schemes for making people buy more of my books,—new combinations, new material combined with old, etc. I do not blame you; I sympathize fully. But on the other hand it is a fact, that you harass me so, you run me so ragged, with your one proposition after another, propositions which, more often than not, I feel unhappily obliged to turn down, that you destroy all my serenity of mind. And surely this is unwise: you do not get anywhere; and you impede me. If you really want a book from me, why not stop worrying me for a while, and give me a chance to write it?
On which genial and diplomatic note, I close.
Trusting, however, in closing, that for one year more it may be said of me by Harpers & Brothers, that although I reject their proposals, I welcome their advances.
Sincerely,
Edna.
Steepletop, Austerlitz, N.Y.
April 4th, 1950
Dear Cass:
I meant to write you at once, after sending you that telegram. For I realized, the moment it had gone, how abrupt and chilly it might sound, unless it were followed at once by a letter explaining it. But I have had little time for writing letters.
The reason I wired you not to come that Friday, was because it suddenly occurred to me that that day would be the day after Thanksgiving day; and I was not at all sure how I should get through that day, the first Thanksgiving Day I had ever spent alone. I got through it all right, and all the other happy holidays, too, by simply by-passing them. (I love that expression.) The only thing I did by way of observance, was to sit at the piano on Christmas Eve, and play and sing some Christmas Carols. And on New Year’s Eve, I rang up Eugens family in Holland. None of them had received any word from me at all, since that one shocking cablegram. And New Year’s Eve, which they call Old Year’s Eve, is a very solemn occasion with them, not like our gay and rowdy drunken tooting. The family assembles, and talks about what has happened in the year that has passed. And I knew that they would talk of Eugen with heavy heartache; and that they would be worrying about me. For they love me as if I were their own kin; as I do them.
I should like very much to see you, and I will let you know as soon as the roads are open. The weather this winter has been phenomenally bad. Spring is at least six weeks later than usual, and the roads are just now beginning to thaw, and are like quicksand. John Pinnie has to walk here every morning, to do the chores. Please forgive me for not writing sooner.
Affectionately,
Edna.
To Mrs. Lena Reusch
The following note was left one morning in the autumn of 1950 for Mrs. Ruesch, a neighbor who helped keep the house.
Dear Lena:
The iron is set too high. Don’t put it on where it says “Linen”—or it will scorch the linen. Try it on “Rayon”— and then, perhaps on “Woollen.” And be careful not to burn your fingers when you shift it from one heat to another.
It is 5:30, and I have been working all night. I am going to bed.
Goodmorning —
E.St.V.M
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A Selection of Photographs
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Camden, Maine, on February 22, 1892.
The poet’s mother, Cora Buzzell Millay, worked as a visiting nurse while Edna (whom everyone called Vincent) and her sisters, Norma and Kathleen, were gr
owing up.
Millay’s high school graduation photo, 1909, Camden, Maine.
Millay, fresh from the country, newly arrived in Manhattan.
Early portrait of the young poet.
On July 18, 1923, Millay married Dutch merchant Eugen Boissevain in the garden of a private home in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.
On her older sister’s wedding day, Norma fashioned a wedding veil from mosquito netting taken from the front porch.
Always happy to pose for the camera, Millay is flanked by two loves of her life, Arthur Davison Ficke (left) and her devoted husband, Fugen Boissevain.
After Millay and Eugen purchased Steepletop in 1925, they posted notices to guard their privacy on the seven-hundred-acre farm.
A famous shot of Millay picketing in Boston in April 1927 for the release of Italian immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.
Millay and Eugen, with one of their first cars, out for a drive in the country.
Millay the poet, circa 1924.
The three sisters: Vincent, Norma, and Kathleen in Maine, circa 1924-25.
Millay in her thirties, having become a famous poet.
Millay in her later years.
Read on
Recommended Reading
Poetry
Edna St. Vincent Millay. Collected Lyrics
(Harper Perennial, 1981)
Elizabeth Barnett, editor. Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Harper Perennial, 1988)
Holly Peppe, editor. Edna St. Vincent
Millay: Early Poems (Penguin Books, 1998)
Colin Falck, editor. Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Selected Poems (Harper Perennial, 1999)
J. D. McClatchy, editor. Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems (American Poets Project, 7: Library of America, 2003)
Biographies
Daniel Mark Epstein. What Lips My Lips