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Renascence and Other Poems
poetry
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1917
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About the author
Edna St. Vincent Millay
446 books1,098 followersEdna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet and playwright. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry, and was also known for her feminist activism and her many love affairs. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work.
This famous portrait of Vincent (as she was called by friends) was taken by Carl Van Vechten in 1933.
This famous portrait of Vincent (as she was called by friends) was taken by Carl Van Vechten in 1933.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 149 reviews
January 18, 2023
She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.
Those concluding lines from Witch Wife, the jewel of this collection, were an early warning. Millay clearly was describing herself, both physically and spiritually. Already in this, her earliest collection, she had posted a largely unheeded warning to all the many suitors who would try and fail to posses her. The poem is beautiful and telling.
The title poem, Renascence, is odd and fascinating, many pages long. Written when she was just twenty and submitted to a national contest, it was the poem that first brought her national recognition and critical acclaim. It is unique among the Millay poems I have read, and though far from my favorite, it may be the most intriguing of her work.
Interim and The Suicide follow Renascence, and like it, they are long poems. (The three together make up two thirds of this slim volume.) Death is the theme of both. I love many of Millay’s poems of death, one of her constant themes, but these two early offering miss the mark. They drone on too long, and their tone struck me as being more akin to juvenile Goth culture than to Millay’s later, far more mature poems of death.
Millay broke the gloom of these two long poems with the exuberance of God’s World -
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
She follows with several, brilliant shorter poems, including Tavern and the above mentioned Witch Wife.
As would become her tradition, the collection closed with several sonnets. The most striking sonnet here is number VI, wherein she reimagined the story of Bluebeard, not as murderousness revealed, but as trust and privacy breached. It is worth quoting in whole:
VI Bluebeard
THIS door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed…. Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,
But only what you see…. Look yet again—
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room to-night
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I seek another place.
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.
Those concluding lines from Witch Wife, the jewel of this collection, were an early warning. Millay clearly was describing herself, both physically and spiritually. Already in this, her earliest collection, she had posted a largely unheeded warning to all the many suitors who would try and fail to posses her. The poem is beautiful and telling.
The title poem, Renascence, is odd and fascinating, many pages long. Written when she was just twenty and submitted to a national contest, it was the poem that first brought her national recognition and critical acclaim. It is unique among the Millay poems I have read, and though far from my favorite, it may be the most intriguing of her work.
Interim and The Suicide follow Renascence, and like it, they are long poems. (The three together make up two thirds of this slim volume.) Death is the theme of both. I love many of Millay’s poems of death, one of her constant themes, but these two early offering miss the mark. They drone on too long, and their tone struck me as being more akin to juvenile Goth culture than to Millay’s later, far more mature poems of death.
Millay broke the gloom of these two long poems with the exuberance of God’s World -
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
She follows with several, brilliant shorter poems, including Tavern and the above mentioned Witch Wife.
As would become her tradition, the collection closed with several sonnets. The most striking sonnet here is number VI, wherein she reimagined the story of Bluebeard, not as murderousness revealed, but as trust and privacy breached. It is worth quoting in whole:
VI Bluebeard
THIS door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed…. Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,
But only what you see…. Look yet again—
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room to-night
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I seek another place.
August 5, 2021
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.
Tucked in for a night's slumber, I wasn't prepared for the energy of this verse. It appeared like a sudden storm, with mammoth, moving images: the colorful torque. Each page elicited the epic and the flawed personal. I was enchanted and duly want to read more of her work.
Or steps leading into the sea.
Tucked in for a night's slumber, I wasn't prepared for the energy of this verse. It appeared like a sudden storm, with mammoth, moving images: the colorful torque. Each page elicited the epic and the flawed personal. I was enchanted and duly want to read more of her work.
April 20, 2015
Millay is one of those poets I think oh sure, I've read, but then realized I really hadn't. This set of poems is some of her earliest work, and is stunning and incredible. Sometimes you have to give a poem a bit, look past the rhyming and look at the meaning. Other times it's not an effort at all. My favorites are the title poem and the six sonnets.
The most familiar poem in this volume is probably the one that starts:
"O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!"
Sound familiar? Good, now read the rest.
Happy National Poetry Month!
The most familiar poem in this volume is probably the one that starts:
"O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!"
Sound familiar? Good, now read the rest.
Happy National Poetry Month!
June 14, 2020
Exquisite poetry !
Full review afterwards.....
Full review afterwards.....
March 4, 2010
First, let me state my personal conviction that you never finish a good poem. It stays with you forever, in your mind. In a quiet moment, a line will be remembered with a clarity that is almost painful in its beauty. More often than not, that memory will lead you back to rereading the poem in its entirety. There is always something fresh, something new, in it- some new understanding, some new and wondrous appreciation for a metaphor, image. A good poem is a joy, always.
That said, Edna St. Vincent Millay is among those poets, besides Shakespeare, who lit my adolescent fire for poetry.
“The rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for
reply”
What romantic heart of any age could not respond to the loneliness in this line, or the lines after.
“thus in winter stands the lonely tree”
Have we not all felt like this, or something akin?
Renascence & Other Poems was the first published collection of her poems. I don’t know enough about formal poetry to critique style or meter by any standard. I know only that I am not shy about stealing (with accreditation) a line or two of hers in my own attempts at poetry.
The opening poem Renascence fosters a chant like vocalization that after a while seems oppressive, but the sense of a joyous rebirth, throughout this longer poem, eventually makes the couplet rhyme essential, and thus, forgivable. It could be done no other way.
Other verses in other styles have the same lyrical beauty, and the sonnets are splendidly unique.
To paraphrase the first line of her poem God’s World-
Edna, I can not hold the close enough!
That said, Edna St. Vincent Millay is among those poets, besides Shakespeare, who lit my adolescent fire for poetry.
“The rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for
reply”
What romantic heart of any age could not respond to the loneliness in this line, or the lines after.
“thus in winter stands the lonely tree”
Have we not all felt like this, or something akin?
Renascence & Other Poems was the first published collection of her poems. I don’t know enough about formal poetry to critique style or meter by any standard. I know only that I am not shy about stealing (with accreditation) a line or two of hers in my own attempts at poetry.
The opening poem Renascence fosters a chant like vocalization that after a while seems oppressive, but the sense of a joyous rebirth, throughout this longer poem, eventually makes the couplet rhyme essential, and thus, forgivable. It could be done no other way.
Other verses in other styles have the same lyrical beauty, and the sonnets are splendidly unique.
To paraphrase the first line of her poem God’s World-
Edna, I can not hold the close enough!
June 3, 2013
Sometimes - at first - I was unsure about the very obvious rhyme scheme. But the power of the words overcame that. In the title poem especially: such an amazing vision of transcendence, and from a 20 year old(?!)
And she sounds so alive (even when she writes of death). As if this were about her:
never shall one room contain me quite
Who in so many rooms first saw the light [Sonnet IV]
Sometimes there were a lot of very well-used nature subjects, still well done though. And just when I thought there were too many she would get me with something wonderful, like this which made me laugh with tears in my eyes:
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him! [Sonnet II]
Other favourites included 'Bluebeard', 'Interim', 'When the Year Grows Old'.
And 'Witch-Wife', the one with the line "She has more hair than she needs" is in this collection too. (It is very lovely.)
I really don't know why I haven't read Millay before, or about her interesting life; though when I last read a lot of poetry I was at school and the anthologies I tended to start from were always very British.
And she sounds so alive (even when she writes of death). As if this were about her:
never shall one room contain me quite
Who in so many rooms first saw the light [Sonnet IV]
Sometimes there were a lot of very well-used nature subjects, still well done though. And just when I thought there were too many she would get me with something wonderful, like this which made me laugh with tears in my eyes:
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him! [Sonnet II]
Other favourites included 'Bluebeard', 'Interim', 'When the Year Grows Old'.
And 'Witch-Wife', the one with the line "She has more hair than she needs" is in this collection too. (It is very lovely.)
I really don't know why I haven't read Millay before, or about her interesting life; though when I last read a lot of poetry I was at school and the anthologies I tended to start from were always very British.
December 23, 2023
She served a lot. I’m gonna reread a few times this week.
May 18, 2025
Edna St. Vincent Millay's first book, published in 1917, including the earlier, long title poem that controversially brought her talent to light in 1912, written when she was 19. These poems could have been plucked from the 19th, or even 18th Centuries, often employing archaic language which even in 1917 (and allowing for scansion) was beyond its sell-by date: "wheresoe'er, 'twas, thee, hadst, laidst, prithee, thou'st, ye, 'tis," etc., etc. Notably, Millay's personal life was modern and ahead of its time even as her poetry looked back. Nevertheless, this is certainly beautiful writing and Millay simultaneously reveals her immense ability and displays her youthful talents and budding maturity. The book begins with three long poems (one in free verse) of which "The Suicide" seemed most effective. There follows 20 shorter poems (including six sonnets) with rich and powerful moments and lines filled passion and emotion. Readers will have their own favorites that speak to them. There are thoughtful and intense themes in these poems, even if at times just here and there. More and better would come. Millay is a poet that people still read today because of the beauty of her works and the emotion caught in her words, not because it's trendy or hip. According to her unscrupulous publisher the book didn't sell well until five years later when her next two books had been published and she had achieved a certain notoriety. In 1913-14, the Imagist poets with H.D. and Amy Lowell were beginning to rumble. T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was published in 1915 and "The Waste Land" would be published in 1922. In 1923 E.E. Cummings published his first book, Tulips & Chimneys. Poetry was changing fast. [3½★]
February 10, 2020
This was my pick for the 2020 Reading Women Challenge #18: A Book Under 100 Pages
I feel like I'm a bit out of practice reading poetry, so not a lot stuck with me but what did was quite powerful. From this set I really enjoyed Witch-Wife, When the Year Grows Old, all the sonnets (especially Bluebeard). Definitely worth revisiting to engage with more, especially those particular titles.
Read via Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/109
I feel like I'm a bit out of practice reading poetry, so not a lot stuck with me but what did was quite powerful. From this set I really enjoyed Witch-Wife, When the Year Grows Old, all the sonnets (especially Bluebeard). Definitely worth revisiting to engage with more, especially those particular titles.
Read via Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/109
April 5, 2019
The earliest poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Renascence: rebirth. In this poem about the freedom of the soul, Millay begins with a narrator who is measuring the limitations of his world and wishing for freedom. But when the restraints are lifted, the narrator wishes for death, and following death, for life again. Millay takes the reader through the experience of these changes, recognizing at last that limitations only exist within the person and can be overcome, even within the confines imposed by the outside world.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
Interim: A poem of grief and survival that struck at a part of my heart that I sometimes try to keep closed. It begins with the poet entering a room that contains a memory of the person lost, “The room is full of you!” and proceeds through the hopeless grief to a kind of faith in tomorrow, the burden of survival.
You are not here. I know that you are gone;
And will not ever enter here again.
And yet it seems to me, if I should speak,
Your silent step must wake across the hall;
And further on:
We were so wholly one I had not thought
That we could die apart. I had not thought
That I could move,--and you be stiff and still!
That I could speak,--and you perforce be dumb!
I believe anyone who has lost a very significant person, particularly a husband or a lover, to death, would understand and feel this poem in a very personal way. And, what is poetry, if not personal?
The Suicide: A sober look at suicide and the consequences on the soul as told from the point of view of the suicide himself.
God’s World: An acclamation of nature.
Afternoon on a Hill: Simple and effective. I quite love it:
I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind blow down the grass,
And the grass rise.
And when lights begin to show
Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
And then start down!
The remaining poems are at turns immature, ineffective, maudlin or sweet, but they all show the promise that at length became a great poet.
Renascence: rebirth. In this poem about the freedom of the soul, Millay begins with a narrator who is measuring the limitations of his world and wishing for freedom. But when the restraints are lifted, the narrator wishes for death, and following death, for life again. Millay takes the reader through the experience of these changes, recognizing at last that limitations only exist within the person and can be overcome, even within the confines imposed by the outside world.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
Interim: A poem of grief and survival that struck at a part of my heart that I sometimes try to keep closed. It begins with the poet entering a room that contains a memory of the person lost, “The room is full of you!” and proceeds through the hopeless grief to a kind of faith in tomorrow, the burden of survival.
You are not here. I know that you are gone;
And will not ever enter here again.
And yet it seems to me, if I should speak,
Your silent step must wake across the hall;
And further on:
We were so wholly one I had not thought
That we could die apart. I had not thought
That I could move,--and you be stiff and still!
That I could speak,--and you perforce be dumb!
I believe anyone who has lost a very significant person, particularly a husband or a lover, to death, would understand and feel this poem in a very personal way. And, what is poetry, if not personal?
The Suicide: A sober look at suicide and the consequences on the soul as told from the point of view of the suicide himself.
God’s World: An acclamation of nature.
Afternoon on a Hill: Simple and effective. I quite love it:
I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind blow down the grass,
And the grass rise.
And when lights begin to show
Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
And then start down!
The remaining poems are at turns immature, ineffective, maudlin or sweet, but they all show the promise that at length became a great poet.
July 31, 2011
Any book of poetry that makes me actually tear up on the bus while reading it deserves five stars. I was startled to find out Millay was in her early 20s when she wrote most of the poems in this book--"Time does not bring relief, you all have lied" doesn't seem the work of a young woman, but that's the mark of a great poet, after all.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!
September 29, 2010
How did I not read this earlier in my life?! She captures pain, grief, and sorrow without being overly melodramatic and also gives glimpses of the light and hope as the pain of loss integrates into a person's being. She does not pretend that the pain goes away - or even that it subsides - just that it becomes part of one and is acceptable. Awesome, awesome poetry! Totally going to recommend this to the teens at our library. :D
June 15, 2018
A few months ago, I was reading a book that happened to mention the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I honestly couldn't tell you what the book was. In any case, it made me curious about reading this poet that I was mostly unfamiliar with. I just wish I had learned about her sooner.
Edna St. Vincent Millay captures both sorrow and elation to absolute perfection. Each verse reads aloud perfectly, and I was genuinely disappointed that I had to finish it silently due to a change of venue (disappointed that I couldn't read it aloud, not disappointed in the poetry). When I pick up a book of classic poetry, this is what I hope for, and I so rarely get it. This is everything I could have wanted.
I may be new to her poetry, but I intend to change my level of familiarity. I look forward to reading more from her. I definitely recommend it to anyone in need of a poetry collection to read.
Edna St. Vincent Millay captures both sorrow and elation to absolute perfection. Each verse reads aloud perfectly, and I was genuinely disappointed that I had to finish it silently due to a change of venue (disappointed that I couldn't read it aloud, not disappointed in the poetry). When I pick up a book of classic poetry, this is what I hope for, and I so rarely get it. This is everything I could have wanted.
I may be new to her poetry, but I intend to change my level of familiarity. I look forward to reading more from her. I definitely recommend it to anyone in need of a poetry collection to read.
June 26, 2025
I much prefer her other works; but this short book was fine too, but since I am already familiar with her other poems, I fear that this did not meet my expectations of her.
May 25, 2025
Picked this back up after a few lines from one of the unnamed sonnets popped into my head this week. There are some gems here.
“Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!”
“Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!”
February 23, 2020
Deep in the earth I rested now;
Cool is its hand upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.
And all at once, and over all
The pitying rain began to fall;
I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatched roof,
And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who’s six feet under ground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.
The rain, I said, is kind to come
And speak to me in my new home.
I wish I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
And then the broad face of the sun
Will laugh about the rain-soaked earth
Unit the world with answering mirth
Shakes joyous, and each round drop
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.
How can I bear it; buried here?
While overhead the sky grows clear
And blue again after the storm,
O, Multi-colored, multiform,
Beloved beauty over me,
That I shall never, never see
Again! Spring-silver, autumn gold,
That I shall never more behold!
Sleeping your myriad magics through,
Close-sepulchred away from you!
O God, I cried, give me new birth,
And put me back upon the earth!
Upset each cloud’s gigantic gourd
And let the heavy rain, down-poured
In one big torrent, set me free,
Washing my grave away from me!
Excerpt from Renascence
Cool is its hand upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.
And all at once, and over all
The pitying rain began to fall;
I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatched roof,
And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who’s six feet under ground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.
The rain, I said, is kind to come
And speak to me in my new home.
I wish I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
And then the broad face of the sun
Will laugh about the rain-soaked earth
Unit the world with answering mirth
Shakes joyous, and each round drop
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.
How can I bear it; buried here?
While overhead the sky grows clear
And blue again after the storm,
O, Multi-colored, multiform,
Beloved beauty over me,
That I shall never, never see
Again! Spring-silver, autumn gold,
That I shall never more behold!
Sleeping your myriad magics through,
Close-sepulchred away from you!
O God, I cried, give me new birth,
And put me back upon the earth!
Upset each cloud’s gigantic gourd
And let the heavy rain, down-poured
In one big torrent, set me free,
Washing my grave away from me!
Excerpt from Renascence
March 30, 2016
I love Millay, so I bought a bunch of these Dover Thrift Editions because they were like $2 each, and this one is pretty okay but nothing special. It does have Witch-Wife and Interim, which I like, but the sonnets at the end are probably the best parts. It's what she would eventually become known for, and I guess for good reason. Her long-form poems don't hold up as well, I don't think.
October 25, 2013
Absolutely marvelous and beautiful poetry. Of the soul-bathing variety.
February 20, 2023
finally some good fucking poetry
March 28, 2019
I am not really drawn to poetry and so I might not have ever discovered Edna St. Vincent Millay. For book club this month we were to come with a poem. This, combined with a review I read about her poem "Renascence" gave me the desire to give this book a try. It was really good! Millay's poem "Renascence" was inspiring. Her other longer poems had a lot of depth to them as well.
Unlike fiction, I feel like you really get to know the author in poetry. Millay LOVES nature. She feels things deeply and she seems religious. The poem about loosing a child made me sure she went through that horrible tragedy but in my research I couldn't find anything about her having children.
This was a good read. I would recommend this to poetry and non-poetry lovers alike.
Unlike fiction, I feel like you really get to know the author in poetry. Millay LOVES nature. She feels things deeply and she seems religious. The poem about loosing a child made me sure she went through that horrible tragedy but in my research I couldn't find anything about her having children.
This was a good read. I would recommend this to poetry and non-poetry lovers alike.
August 31, 2025
Really beautiful poems about grief, loss, love, and rebirth/independence. Super quotable, and I recognized famous lines that I didn't know were Millay/didn't know I knew. So super short, yet feels really complete! Loved the structure of the poems, the ordering, and the fitting end -- especially after all the poems about missing someone you knew intimately, and the ambivalence between choosing grief/moreoseness and choosing life, it was like "Oof!" to be left there at the end.
I will read more Millay!
I will read more Millay!
January 30, 2020
Edna St. Vincent Millay Biography
Analysis of the sonnet Time Does Not Bring Relief, which is one of the "other poems" in this volume.
The poem Recuerdo isn't included in this collection, but this is a recording of Edna St. Vincent Millay reading it. I think hearing the poet read their own work gives a much richer appreciation of it.
Analysis of the sonnet Time Does Not Bring Relief, which is one of the "other poems" in this volume.
The poem Recuerdo isn't included in this collection, but this is a recording of Edna St. Vincent Millay reading it. I think hearing the poet read their own work gives a much richer appreciation of it.
January 1, 2018
If you had known there was so little time
You would have dropped your pen and come to me
Edna is a genius and every poem in this collection is striking, but I cannot read "Interim" without crying.
You would have dropped your pen and come to me
Edna is a genius and every poem in this collection is striking, but I cannot read "Interim" without crying.
February 4, 2021
Nature, after life, letting go, death. Her poems intermingled these four main themes. These four too represent the strongest emotions. Nature could be after life, could be death and it all tied up with the heartbreaking of learning how to let go.
August 2, 2020
What a beautiful poetry.
September 11, 2020
”this now is yours. i seek another place.”
why did i wait so long to start reading poetry?
rating: 4/5 stars
September 29, 2023
4.5
this was so, so beautiful. I'll have to read more by her and about her to make any grand proclamations about her being my absolute favorite, so far she is one of the best I've read.
this was so, so beautiful. I'll have to read more by her and about her to make any grand proclamations about her being my absolute favorite, so far she is one of the best I've read.
July 10, 2018
These poems are disarming, immediate, and expansive. I’ve read most of Millay’s short poems at some point or another but not in an early collection like this and not many of her lyrical poems. “Interim” was a new gem of hers for me and left me in tears when I meant to just read a few quick pages before bed.
December 23, 2024
Existence itself is almost too much to bear. It's more than one life can hold, which is why it's so often fumbled, landing silently in the snow, sticking there, being buried there. I swear I've had the same feelings as Edna, of looking up at the impossibility of the wide blue sky, or the impossibility of the inevitable grave, or the impossibility of love. The sensations we feel, especially the longings, they threaten to rip us apart. But the tearing is a good thing, it opens us up to be better receptacles of experience, roomier vessels. Poetry seems to be the only medium able to properly distill these feelings into words. The closest prose gets to it is probably the gargantuan Russian novels, but they cover another angle, one reliant entirely on the enormity, on the overwhelming "everything." Though made up of innumerable moments, such large works crowd out the individual moments and smaller feelings in service to an overall effect, to overall arcs and other big arching things.
But Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose very name is a poem in itself, she wrote with such a full soul at the age of only 19 or 20. I love it. Her writing is simultaneously relatable yet almost intimidating; she's felt with such intensity, yet she delicately imbues her language with only the golden halo of her own experiences, her own dreams. Like the Russian masters, it takes her some time for her to get up to speed, to get across her effect, but when she does, I shiver. Sadly, her shorter poems are mostly forgettable, but the longer ones never drag. They rip me open in the best way:
So here upon my back I'll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And—sure enough!—I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I 'most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me
The only direction to go after reaching up is falling down, and the earth swallows her entire. She somewhat longs for this, is comforted by this, embraces the earth back, this Sheol. This poem's profundity comes from the temporal mismatch of its composition: the writing, and thus the reading can only occur with the aid of the living, but the thing it describes is such a final, impossible, inevitable thing. The words are entombed as a sort of testament to her at that age, in that frame of mind, in that state of her soul. Now she knows more than any of us living, reading know. It's both humbling and sobering.
I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
We take so much for granted, and that's perhaps the greatest achievement of observational poetry: the ability to remind us of all that which we see without seeing. We're usually too busy with work or "life" to experience the details right in front of us. Even more than the details, we take all of life for granted, the very act of living itself. She writes of a resurrection, literal or metaphorical it matters not, which strikes you to the core when you read it.
I felt the rain's cool finger-tips
Brushed tenderly across my lips,
Laid gently on my sealed sight,
And all at once the heavy night
Fell from my eyes and I could see,—
...
I know not how such things can be!—
I breathed my soul back into me.
"I breathed my soul back into me" is such a perfect line of iambic tetrameter, and I'll probably remember it until the day I die, ironic as that is. The poem as a whole takes on the shape and hue of a rainbow, the natural result of the rains she describes. The feeling it gives is like an old Disney movie, the ones which had such dark, terrible climaxes, where the dragon looked like it must eat up the knight, but miraculously, at the last possible second, the knight plunges his sword into the heaving purple-scaled chest.
Though she's known for "Renascence" (for good reason), to me the superior poem is "Interim." This one describes the loss of a love, and once again whether the death is literal or metaphorical is of no importance. Either way it works, and works tremendously. From the very first line ("The room is full of you!—") we feel the vacuum pull of an absence, of loss, a disorienting, swirling thing "intangible, /
Yet stiff with meaning." Two moments from it completely wrecked me:
And brought it in to show me! I recall
With terrible distinctness how the smell
Of your cool gardens drifted in with you.
I know, you held it up for me to see
And flushed because I looked not at the flower,
But at your face; and when behind my look
You saw such unmistakable intent
You laughed and brushed your flower against my lips.
(You were the fairest thing God ever made,
I think.) And then your hands above my heart
Drew down its stem into a fastening,
And while your head was bent I kissed your hair.
I wonder if you knew.
...
Save that it was the first. I did not know,
Then, that it was the last. If I had known—
But then, it does not matter. Strange how few,
After all's said and done, the things that are
Of moment.
Few indeed! When I can make
Of ten small words a rope to hang the world!
"I had you and I have you now no more."
There, there it dangles,—where's the little truth
That can for long keep footing under that
When its slack syllables tighten to a thought?
Here, let me write it down! I wish to see
Just how a thing like that will look on paper!
"*I had you and I have you now no more*."
O little words, how can you run so straight
Across the page, beneath the weight you bear?
How can you fall apart, whom such a theme
Has bound together, and hereafter aid
In trivial expression, that have been
So hideously dignified?—Would God
That tearing you apart would tear the thread
I strung you on! Would God—O God, my mind
Stretches asunder on this merciless rack
Of imagery! O, let me sleep a while!
Ruins are difficult to sit within, but they're the things upon which we build our lives. There are a few defining moments in the shadow of which every other moment lives, these parasitic cells we find ourselves in. One way to process this aftermath is to write about it, but even that must needs fail, must falter at the exact most important moment. We can only get off glancing shots, we can never kill the past; instead it kills us, eats us alive, consumes all. There's only one antidote:
Not Truth, but Faith, it is
That keeps the world alive. If all at once
Faith were to slacken,—that unconscious faith
Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone
Of all believing,—birds now flying fearless
Across would drop in terror to the earth;
Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins
Would tangle in the frantic hands of God
And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!
O God, I see it now, and my sick brain
Staggers and swoons! How often over me
Flashes this breathlessness of sudden sight
In which I see the universe unrolled
Before me like a scroll and read thereon
Chaos and Doom, where helpless planets whirl
Dizzily round and round and round and round,
Like tops across a table, gathering speed
With every spin, to waver on the edge
One instant—looking over—and the next
To shudder and lurch forward out of sight—
*****
Ah, I am worn out—I am wearied out—
It is too much—I am but flesh and blood,
And I must sleep. Though you were dead again,
I am but flesh and blood and I must sleep.
"All things are wearisome, more than one can say," Ecclesiastes 1:8. If we let ourselves spiral, if we lose the faith, we tire ourselves to death, to a tiredness desirous of death, to a weariness beyond all endurance. So strange the way words have with us, which can alter our reality, can in one moment make us lament lost loves and in the next smile over cherished memories. We have such a power in our fingers, in our tongues, and we must promise to hold the faith, otherwise this power can be used for evil. I think that that's much of what's at the root of modern art: a lack of faith, which turns inward and eats itself alive, still ravenous after consummation, never finding enough sustenance. Edna looked outward and saw the eternities, the transcendent, and fed on it to satiation. Modern art looks inward and runs out of material once the organs all are cooked and eaten and crapped out. Best to learn from them and stay closer to Edna than Ezra (Pound).
To wrap things up, I wanted to say how happy I am to be slowly discovering a whole coterie of young women poets from the turn of the century who I've fallen in love with: Adelaide Crapsey, Lorine Niedecker, and now Edna. In fond appreciation of her, I wrote a poem inspired by this small collection; I'll include it below:
I punch the meat of the palm of my hand in missing you
I read Edna St. Vincent Millay
(her name itself a poem)
and find myself falling in love all over again—
but with the poet, not with you;
her instead, the long-dead, no risk of heartbreak there
only a post-hoc love “so hideously dignified.”
I defy augury and other gravediggers
and pray for the rain to wash away
the grave of my beloved poet.
I’m sorry to admit that
I love her more than I love you
because she entombed our brief kiss
in sweeter words than I could twist
together: a paper flower stem, or two hands
sweaty, uncertain— but I’m just happy to be
sitting on this retaining wall with you
for as long as this moment dares last in our memory
and she in mine, she in mine.
But Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose very name is a poem in itself, she wrote with such a full soul at the age of only 19 or 20. I love it. Her writing is simultaneously relatable yet almost intimidating; she's felt with such intensity, yet she delicately imbues her language with only the golden halo of her own experiences, her own dreams. Like the Russian masters, it takes her some time for her to get up to speed, to get across her effect, but when she does, I shiver. Sadly, her shorter poems are mostly forgettable, but the longer ones never drag. They rip me open in the best way:
So here upon my back I'll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And—sure enough!—I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I 'most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me
The only direction to go after reaching up is falling down, and the earth swallows her entire. She somewhat longs for this, is comforted by this, embraces the earth back, this Sheol. This poem's profundity comes from the temporal mismatch of its composition: the writing, and thus the reading can only occur with the aid of the living, but the thing it describes is such a final, impossible, inevitable thing. The words are entombed as a sort of testament to her at that age, in that frame of mind, in that state of her soul. Now she knows more than any of us living, reading know. It's both humbling and sobering.
I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
We take so much for granted, and that's perhaps the greatest achievement of observational poetry: the ability to remind us of all that which we see without seeing. We're usually too busy with work or "life" to experience the details right in front of us. Even more than the details, we take all of life for granted, the very act of living itself. She writes of a resurrection, literal or metaphorical it matters not, which strikes you to the core when you read it.
I felt the rain's cool finger-tips
Brushed tenderly across my lips,
Laid gently on my sealed sight,
And all at once the heavy night
Fell from my eyes and I could see,—
...
I know not how such things can be!—
I breathed my soul back into me.
"I breathed my soul back into me" is such a perfect line of iambic tetrameter, and I'll probably remember it until the day I die, ironic as that is. The poem as a whole takes on the shape and hue of a rainbow, the natural result of the rains she describes. The feeling it gives is like an old Disney movie, the ones which had such dark, terrible climaxes, where the dragon looked like it must eat up the knight, but miraculously, at the last possible second, the knight plunges his sword into the heaving purple-scaled chest.
Though she's known for "Renascence" (for good reason), to me the superior poem is "Interim." This one describes the loss of a love, and once again whether the death is literal or metaphorical is of no importance. Either way it works, and works tremendously. From the very first line ("The room is full of you!—") we feel the vacuum pull of an absence, of loss, a disorienting, swirling thing "intangible, /
Yet stiff with meaning." Two moments from it completely wrecked me:
And brought it in to show me! I recall
With terrible distinctness how the smell
Of your cool gardens drifted in with you.
I know, you held it up for me to see
And flushed because I looked not at the flower,
But at your face; and when behind my look
You saw such unmistakable intent
You laughed and brushed your flower against my lips.
(You were the fairest thing God ever made,
I think.) And then your hands above my heart
Drew down its stem into a fastening,
And while your head was bent I kissed your hair.
I wonder if you knew.
...
Save that it was the first. I did not know,
Then, that it was the last. If I had known—
But then, it does not matter. Strange how few,
After all's said and done, the things that are
Of moment.
Few indeed! When I can make
Of ten small words a rope to hang the world!
"I had you and I have you now no more."
There, there it dangles,—where's the little truth
That can for long keep footing under that
When its slack syllables tighten to a thought?
Here, let me write it down! I wish to see
Just how a thing like that will look on paper!
"*I had you and I have you now no more*."
O little words, how can you run so straight
Across the page, beneath the weight you bear?
How can you fall apart, whom such a theme
Has bound together, and hereafter aid
In trivial expression, that have been
So hideously dignified?—Would God
That tearing you apart would tear the thread
I strung you on! Would God—O God, my mind
Stretches asunder on this merciless rack
Of imagery! O, let me sleep a while!
Ruins are difficult to sit within, but they're the things upon which we build our lives. There are a few defining moments in the shadow of which every other moment lives, these parasitic cells we find ourselves in. One way to process this aftermath is to write about it, but even that must needs fail, must falter at the exact most important moment. We can only get off glancing shots, we can never kill the past; instead it kills us, eats us alive, consumes all. There's only one antidote:
Not Truth, but Faith, it is
That keeps the world alive. If all at once
Faith were to slacken,—that unconscious faith
Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone
Of all believing,—birds now flying fearless
Across would drop in terror to the earth;
Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins
Would tangle in the frantic hands of God
And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!
O God, I see it now, and my sick brain
Staggers and swoons! How often over me
Flashes this breathlessness of sudden sight
In which I see the universe unrolled
Before me like a scroll and read thereon
Chaos and Doom, where helpless planets whirl
Dizzily round and round and round and round,
Like tops across a table, gathering speed
With every spin, to waver on the edge
One instant—looking over—and the next
To shudder and lurch forward out of sight—
*****
Ah, I am worn out—I am wearied out—
It is too much—I am but flesh and blood,
And I must sleep. Though you were dead again,
I am but flesh and blood and I must sleep.
"All things are wearisome, more than one can say," Ecclesiastes 1:8. If we let ourselves spiral, if we lose the faith, we tire ourselves to death, to a tiredness desirous of death, to a weariness beyond all endurance. So strange the way words have with us, which can alter our reality, can in one moment make us lament lost loves and in the next smile over cherished memories. We have such a power in our fingers, in our tongues, and we must promise to hold the faith, otherwise this power can be used for evil. I think that that's much of what's at the root of modern art: a lack of faith, which turns inward and eats itself alive, still ravenous after consummation, never finding enough sustenance. Edna looked outward and saw the eternities, the transcendent, and fed on it to satiation. Modern art looks inward and runs out of material once the organs all are cooked and eaten and crapped out. Best to learn from them and stay closer to Edna than Ezra (Pound).
To wrap things up, I wanted to say how happy I am to be slowly discovering a whole coterie of young women poets from the turn of the century who I've fallen in love with: Adelaide Crapsey, Lorine Niedecker, and now Edna. In fond appreciation of her, I wrote a poem inspired by this small collection; I'll include it below:
I punch the meat of the palm of my hand in missing you
I read Edna St. Vincent Millay
(her name itself a poem)
and find myself falling in love all over again—
but with the poet, not with you;
her instead, the long-dead, no risk of heartbreak there
only a post-hoc love “so hideously dignified.”
I defy augury and other gravediggers
and pray for the rain to wash away
the grave of my beloved poet.
I’m sorry to admit that
I love her more than I love you
because she entombed our brief kiss
in sweeter words than I could twist
together: a paper flower stem, or two hands
sweaty, uncertain— but I’m just happy to be
sitting on this retaining wall with you
for as long as this moment dares last in our memory
and she in mine, she in mine.
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