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Fatal Interview: Sonnets
'In this volume, Edna St. Vincent Millay shows herself an ardent lover of life and beauty. Here, in a matchless sonnet sequence, is enshrined the quintessence of her emotional and artistic power. She brings to the classic form new color and new splendor.'
52 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1931
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259 people want to read
About the author
Edna St. Vincent Millay
436 books1,087 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 - 23 of 23 reviews
January 19, 2023
I find some women 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 willful, took their knights to bed.
Edna St. Vincent Millay in mid life had an affair with a young poet, fourteen years her junior. George Dillon was a minor poet. None of his books are in print, nor his poems remembered. When remembered at all it is for his affair with Millay. Yet to Millay this love was monumental, life shattering. These fifty-two poems, written to commemorate her love affair may be the greatest sonnet cycle ever recorded in English. In them she transforms the forgotten Dillon into a very god:
I Dreamed I moved among the Elysian fields,
In converse with sweet women long since dead;
And out of blossoms which that meadow yields
I wove a garland for your living head.
Danae, that was the vessel for a day
Of golden Jove, I saw, and at her side,
Whom Jove the Bull desired and bore away,
Europa stood, and the Swan’s featherless bride.
All these were mortal women, yet all these
Above the ground had had a god for guest;
Freely I walked beside them and at ease,
Addressing them, by them again addressed,
And marveled nothing, for remembering you,
Wherefore I was among them well I knew.
Desire, passion, lust, agony, and loss fill these sonnets, and are barely contained on the page. Millay, at the height of her power transposed her passion into burning, unforgettable poetry, invoking heaven and hell, the seasons and the sun and moon, weaving classical mythology into her verse all in service to her great Love. Here it is, complete, from giddy beginnings:
Not in a silver casket cool with pearls
Or rich with red corundum or with blue,
Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls
Having given their loves, I give my love to you;
Not in a lovers-knot, not in a ring
Worked in such a fashion, and the legend plain
Semper fidelis, where a secret spring
Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain:
Love in the open hand, no thing but that,
Ungemmed, unhindered, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslip in a hat
Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,
I bring you, calling out as children do;
“Look what I have! - And these are all for you.”
to inevitable, tragic end:
The heart once broken is a heart no more,
And is absolved from all a heart must be;
All that it signed or chartered heretofore
Is canceled now, the bankrupt heart is free;
So much of duty as you may require
Of shards and dust, this and no more pain,
This and no more of hope, remorse, desire,
The heart once broken need support again.
How simple ‘tis, and what a little sound
It makes in breaking, let the world attest:
It struggles, and it fails; the world goes round,
And the moon follows it. Heart in my breast.
‘Tis half a year now since you broke in two;
The world’s forgotten well, if the world knew.
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 willful, took their knights to bed.
Edna St. Vincent Millay in mid life had an affair with a young poet, fourteen years her junior. George Dillon was a minor poet. None of his books are in print, nor his poems remembered. When remembered at all it is for his affair with Millay. Yet to Millay this love was monumental, life shattering. These fifty-two poems, written to commemorate her love affair may be the greatest sonnet cycle ever recorded in English. In them she transforms the forgotten Dillon into a very god:
I Dreamed I moved among the Elysian fields,
In converse with sweet women long since dead;
And out of blossoms which that meadow yields
I wove a garland for your living head.
Danae, that was the vessel for a day
Of golden Jove, I saw, and at her side,
Whom Jove the Bull desired and bore away,
Europa stood, and the Swan’s featherless bride.
All these were mortal women, yet all these
Above the ground had had a god for guest;
Freely I walked beside them and at ease,
Addressing them, by them again addressed,
And marveled nothing, for remembering you,
Wherefore I was among them well I knew.
Desire, passion, lust, agony, and loss fill these sonnets, and are barely contained on the page. Millay, at the height of her power transposed her passion into burning, unforgettable poetry, invoking heaven and hell, the seasons and the sun and moon, weaving classical mythology into her verse all in service to her great Love. Here it is, complete, from giddy beginnings:
Not in a silver casket cool with pearls
Or rich with red corundum or with blue,
Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls
Having given their loves, I give my love to you;
Not in a lovers-knot, not in a ring
Worked in such a fashion, and the legend plain
Semper fidelis, where a secret spring
Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain:
Love in the open hand, no thing but that,
Ungemmed, unhindered, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslip in a hat
Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,
I bring you, calling out as children do;
“Look what I have! - And these are all for you.”
to inevitable, tragic end:
The heart once broken is a heart no more,
And is absolved from all a heart must be;
All that it signed or chartered heretofore
Is canceled now, the bankrupt heart is free;
So much of duty as you may require
Of shards and dust, this and no more pain,
This and no more of hope, remorse, desire,
The heart once broken need support again.
How simple ‘tis, and what a little sound
It makes in breaking, let the world attest:
It struggles, and it fails; the world goes round,
And the moon follows it. Heart in my breast.
‘Tis half a year now since you broke in two;
The world’s forgotten well, if the world knew.
June 4, 2014
John Donne once referred to poetry, to sonnets, as rooms. In any ways, this pegs the sonnets in this volume. Like Donne, whose rooms referred to his love, the sonnets here seem to chart a love affair – from its nebulous beginnings to its conflict middle to a type of a death. Is it love of an immortal for a mortal, of soul to soul, of true minds meeting?
While not the last surely.
The speaker is dying or watching death, the speaker is Helen or the Trojans or the Greeks or the goddess. The speaker is but a poor soul speaking of two souls meeting but not grafting on to one another.
Is the speaking struggling against love, for love, against self, against the lover?
Yes and no to all the above.
Properly written the sonnet, any sonnet, is a house with each line, if not each word being a room, a library of books that point to different directions and carry the reader with it.
Millay’s sonnets are like this.
While not the last surely.
The speaker is dying or watching death, the speaker is Helen or the Trojans or the Greeks or the goddess. The speaker is but a poor soul speaking of two souls meeting but not grafting on to one another.
Is the speaking struggling against love, for love, against self, against the lover?
Yes and no to all the above.
Properly written the sonnet, any sonnet, is a house with each line, if not each word being a room, a library of books that point to different directions and carry the reader with it.
Millay’s sonnets are like this.
June 20, 2022
As a chef, I prefer simple cooking, but I am in awe of the technical wizardry of Ferran Adria. I love watching documentaries about his creations and imagining what it would be like to taste them, despite the fact that I have no aspiration or desire to cook like that. His brilliance makes me forget that we are practicing the same art. It's otherworldly in the truest sense.
Similarly, I've said before that I'm not really a "sonnet person"---I prefer my poetry free. Rhyme is ok, but sometimes feels too contrived and distracting.
What EStVM has done with sonnets here is otherworldly in the same way. She perfected this traditional form and used it to convey emotions-passion, desire, love, loss-in language that dazzles.
Sonnets can be sexy!
"My needle to your north abruptly swerved" made me blush.
Having read a few biographies I know the details of the relationship this cycle documents, and this knowledge made the poems burn even brighter for me. But I think they are gorgeous on their own merit.
Speaking of gorgeous, I treated myself to an original edition (1931,16th printing) and the book itself is a thing of beauty. Poetry is even better printed on fine paper. I will definitely read this again and again.
Similarly, I've said before that I'm not really a "sonnet person"---I prefer my poetry free. Rhyme is ok, but sometimes feels too contrived and distracting.
What EStVM has done with sonnets here is otherworldly in the same way. She perfected this traditional form and used it to convey emotions-passion, desire, love, loss-in language that dazzles.
Sonnets can be sexy!
"My needle to your north abruptly swerved" made me blush.
Having read a few biographies I know the details of the relationship this cycle documents, and this knowledge made the poems burn even brighter for me. But I think they are gorgeous on their own merit.
Speaking of gorgeous, I treated myself to an original edition (1931,16th printing) and the book itself is a thing of beauty. Poetry is even better printed on fine paper. I will definitely read this again and again.
January 17, 2022
I
What thing is this that, built of salt and lime
And such dry motes as in the sunbeam show,
Has power upon me that do daily climb
The dustless air? - for whom those peaks of snow
Whereup the lungs of man with borrowed breath
Go labouring to a doom I may not feel,
Are but a pearled and roseate plain beneath
My winged helmet and my winged heal.
What sweet emotions neither foe nor friend
Are these that clog my flight? what thing is this
That hastening headlong to a dusty end
Dare turn upon me these proud eyes of bliss?
Up, up, my feathers! - ere I lay you by
To journey barefoot with a mortal joy.
II
This beast that rends me in the sight of all,
This love, this longing, this oblivious thing,
That has me under as the last leaves fall
Will glut, will sicken, will be gone by spring.
The wound will heal, the fever will abate
The knotted hurt will slacken in the breast;
I shall forget before the flickers mate
Your look that is today my east and west.
Unscathed, however, from a claw so deep
Though I should love again I shall not go:
Along my body, waking as I sleep,
Sharp to the kiss, cold the to the hand as snow,
The scar of this encounter, like a sword
Will lie between me and my troubled lord.
VII
Night is my sister, and how deep in love,
How drowned in love and weedily washed ashore,
There to be fretted by the drag and shove
At the tide's edge, I lie-these things and more:
Whose arm alone between me and the sand,
Whose voice alone, whose pitiful breath brought near,
Could thaw these nostrils and unlock this hand,
She could advise you, should you care to hear.
Small chance, however, in a storm so black,
A man will leave his friendly fire and snug
For a drowned woman's sake, and bring her back
To drip and scatter shells upon the rug.
No one but Night, with tears on her dark face,
Watches beside me in this windy place.
XIV
Since of no creature living the last breath
Is twice required, or twice the ultimate pain,
Seeing how to quit your arms is very death,
‘Tis likely that I shall not die again;
And likely ‘tis that Time whose gross decree
Sends now the dawn to clamour at our door,
Thus having done his evil worst to me,
Will thrust me by, will harry me no more.
When you are corn and roses and at rest
I shall endure, a dense and sanguine ghost,
To haunt the scene where I was happiest,
To bend above the thing I loved the most;
And rise, and wring my hands, and steal away
As I do now, before the advancing day.
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 cannot 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 need 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 may well be. I do not think I would.
XLVI
Even in the moment of our earliest kiss,
When sighed the straitened bud into the flower,
Sat the dry seed of most unwelcome this;
And that I knew, though not the day and hour.
Too season-wise am I, being country-bred,
To tilt at autumn or defy the frost:
Snuffing the chill even as my fathers did,
I say with them, "What's out tonight is lost."
I only hoped, with the mild hope of all
Who watch the leaf take shape upon the tree,
A fairer summer and a later fall
Than in these parts a man is apt to see,
And sunny clusters ripened for the wine:
I tell you this across the blackened vine.
XLVII
Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.
Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that's permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.
If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
Should I outlive this anguish — and men do —
I shall have only good to say of you.
XLVIII
Now by the path I climbed, I journey back.
The oaks have grown; I have been long away.
Taking with me your memory and your lack
I now descend into a milder day;
Stripped of your love, unburdened of my hope,
Descend the path I mounted from the plain;
Yet steeper than I fancied seems the slope
And stonier, now that I go down again.
Warm falls the dusk; the clanking of a bell
Faintly ascends upon this heavier air;
I do recall those grassy pastures well:
In early spring they drove the cattle there.
And close at hand should be a shelter, too,
From which the mountain peaks are not in view.
XLIX
There is a well into whose bottomless eye,
Though I were flayed, I dare not lean and look,
Sweet once with mountain water, now gone dry,
Miraculously abandoned by the brook
Wherewith for years miraculously fed
It kept a constant level cold and bright,
Though summer parched the rivers in their bed;
Withdrawn these waters, vanished overnight.
There is a word I dare not speak again,
A face I never again must call to mind;
I was not craven ever nor blenched at pain,
But pain to such degree and of such kind
As I must suffer if I think of you,
Not in my senses will I undergo.
L
The heart once broken is a heart no more,
And is absolved from all a heart must be;
All that it signed or chartered heretofore
Is cancelled now, the bankrupt heart is free;
So much of duty as you may require
Of shards and dust, this and no more of pain,
This and no more of hope, remorse, desire,
The heart once broken need support again.
How simple 'tis, and what a little sound
It makes in breaking, let the world attest:
It struggles, and it fails; the world goes round,
And the moon follows it. Heart in my breast,
'Tis half a year now since you broke in two;
The world's forgotten well; if the world knew.
LI
If in the years to come you should recall,
When faint in heart or fallen on hungry days,
Or full of griefs and little if at all
From them distracted by delights or praise;
When failing powers or good opinion lost
Have bowed your neck, should you recall to mind
How of all men I honoured you the most,
Holding your noblest among mortal-kind:
Might not my love — although the curving blade
From whose wide mowing none may hope to hide,
Me long ago below the frosts had laid —
Restore you somewhat to your former pride?
Indeed I think this memory, even then,
Must raise you high among the run of men.
LII
Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave,
Mortal Endymion, darling of the Moon!
Her silver garments by the senseless wave
Shouldered and dropped and on the shingle strewn,
Her fluttering hand against her forehead pressed,
Her scattered looks that troubled all the sky,
Her rapid footsteps running down the west —
Of all her altered state, oblivious lie!
Whom earthen you, by deathless lips adored,
Wild-eyed and stammering to the grasses thrust,
And deep into her crystal body poured
The hot and sorrowful sweetness of the dust:
Whereof she wanders mad, being all unfit
For mortal love, that might not die of it.
What thing is this that, built of salt and lime
And such dry motes as in the sunbeam show,
Has power upon me that do daily climb
The dustless air? - for whom those peaks of snow
Whereup the lungs of man with borrowed breath
Go labouring to a doom I may not feel,
Are but a pearled and roseate plain beneath
My winged helmet and my winged heal.
What sweet emotions neither foe nor friend
Are these that clog my flight? what thing is this
That hastening headlong to a dusty end
Dare turn upon me these proud eyes of bliss?
Up, up, my feathers! - ere I lay you by
To journey barefoot with a mortal joy.
II
This beast that rends me in the sight of all,
This love, this longing, this oblivious thing,
That has me under as the last leaves fall
Will glut, will sicken, will be gone by spring.
The wound will heal, the fever will abate
The knotted hurt will slacken in the breast;
I shall forget before the flickers mate
Your look that is today my east and west.
Unscathed, however, from a claw so deep
Though I should love again I shall not go:
Along my body, waking as I sleep,
Sharp to the kiss, cold the to the hand as snow,
The scar of this encounter, like a sword
Will lie between me and my troubled lord.
VII
Night is my sister, and how deep in love,
How drowned in love and weedily washed ashore,
There to be fretted by the drag and shove
At the tide's edge, I lie-these things and more:
Whose arm alone between me and the sand,
Whose voice alone, whose pitiful breath brought near,
Could thaw these nostrils and unlock this hand,
She could advise you, should you care to hear.
Small chance, however, in a storm so black,
A man will leave his friendly fire and snug
For a drowned woman's sake, and bring her back
To drip and scatter shells upon the rug.
No one but Night, with tears on her dark face,
Watches beside me in this windy place.
XIV
Since of no creature living the last breath
Is twice required, or twice the ultimate pain,
Seeing how to quit your arms is very death,
‘Tis likely that I shall not die again;
And likely ‘tis that Time whose gross decree
Sends now the dawn to clamour at our door,
Thus having done his evil worst to me,
Will thrust me by, will harry me no more.
When you are corn and roses and at rest
I shall endure, a dense and sanguine ghost,
To haunt the scene where I was happiest,
To bend above the thing I loved the most;
And rise, and wring my hands, and steal away
As I do now, before the advancing day.
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 cannot 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 need 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 may well be. I do not think I would.
XLVI
Even in the moment of our earliest kiss,
When sighed the straitened bud into the flower,
Sat the dry seed of most unwelcome this;
And that I knew, though not the day and hour.
Too season-wise am I, being country-bred,
To tilt at autumn or defy the frost:
Snuffing the chill even as my fathers did,
I say with them, "What's out tonight is lost."
I only hoped, with the mild hope of all
Who watch the leaf take shape upon the tree,
A fairer summer and a later fall
Than in these parts a man is apt to see,
And sunny clusters ripened for the wine:
I tell you this across the blackened vine.
XLVII
Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.
Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that's permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.
If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
Should I outlive this anguish — and men do —
I shall have only good to say of you.
XLVIII
Now by the path I climbed, I journey back.
The oaks have grown; I have been long away.
Taking with me your memory and your lack
I now descend into a milder day;
Stripped of your love, unburdened of my hope,
Descend the path I mounted from the plain;
Yet steeper than I fancied seems the slope
And stonier, now that I go down again.
Warm falls the dusk; the clanking of a bell
Faintly ascends upon this heavier air;
I do recall those grassy pastures well:
In early spring they drove the cattle there.
And close at hand should be a shelter, too,
From which the mountain peaks are not in view.
XLIX
There is a well into whose bottomless eye,
Though I were flayed, I dare not lean and look,
Sweet once with mountain water, now gone dry,
Miraculously abandoned by the brook
Wherewith for years miraculously fed
It kept a constant level cold and bright,
Though summer parched the rivers in their bed;
Withdrawn these waters, vanished overnight.
There is a word I dare not speak again,
A face I never again must call to mind;
I was not craven ever nor blenched at pain,
But pain to such degree and of such kind
As I must suffer if I think of you,
Not in my senses will I undergo.
L
The heart once broken is a heart no more,
And is absolved from all a heart must be;
All that it signed or chartered heretofore
Is cancelled now, the bankrupt heart is free;
So much of duty as you may require
Of shards and dust, this and no more of pain,
This and no more of hope, remorse, desire,
The heart once broken need support again.
How simple 'tis, and what a little sound
It makes in breaking, let the world attest:
It struggles, and it fails; the world goes round,
And the moon follows it. Heart in my breast,
'Tis half a year now since you broke in two;
The world's forgotten well; if the world knew.
LI
If in the years to come you should recall,
When faint in heart or fallen on hungry days,
Or full of griefs and little if at all
From them distracted by delights or praise;
When failing powers or good opinion lost
Have bowed your neck, should you recall to mind
How of all men I honoured you the most,
Holding your noblest among mortal-kind:
Might not my love — although the curving blade
From whose wide mowing none may hope to hide,
Me long ago below the frosts had laid —
Restore you somewhat to your former pride?
Indeed I think this memory, even then,
Must raise you high among the run of men.
LII
Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave,
Mortal Endymion, darling of the Moon!
Her silver garments by the senseless wave
Shouldered and dropped and on the shingle strewn,
Her fluttering hand against her forehead pressed,
Her scattered looks that troubled all the sky,
Her rapid footsteps running down the west —
Of all her altered state, oblivious lie!
Whom earthen you, by deathless lips adored,
Wild-eyed and stammering to the grasses thrust,
And deep into her crystal body poured
The hot and sorrowful sweetness of the dust:
Whereof she wanders mad, being all unfit
For mortal love, that might not die of it.
December 11, 2020
Utterly intoxicating.
August 31, 2021
The love portrayed here is the aspiration, regardless of the consequence.
June 4, 2024
FULL REVIEW ON MY WEBSITE
https://thebookcornerchronicles.com/2...
This poem was a little bit from the past poem I reviewed which was “Love Is Not All, Veertien Sonetten”. But it was much better.
The writing style was pretty average if you ask me here. It wasn’t bad not good. It was okay.
The story was okay in this poem but it could have been much better than it actually was. But as you might imagine by the rating I had hard time connecting with the story which result in low rating.
https://thebookcornerchronicles.com/2...
This poem was a little bit from the past poem I reviewed which was “Love Is Not All, Veertien Sonetten”. But it was much better.
The writing style was pretty average if you ask me here. It wasn’t bad not good. It was okay.
The story was okay in this poem but it could have been much better than it actually was. But as you might imagine by the rating I had hard time connecting with the story which result in low rating.
February 23, 2021
A set of sonnets about Millay’s affair with George Dillon, it is best when it uses more conversational speech rather than archaic elevated language. In terms of feeling, it is far more raw than Dillon’s The Flowering Stone.
January 2, 2018
The best!
January 18, 2019
The most impressive thing I've ever read. Love, love lost, and acceptance thereof. A million-star rating, if there is such a thing.
May 4, 2019
read this carefully; give millay the time she deserves
October 8, 2019
Perhaps one of the best collections of poetry that I've ever read. Heartwrenching and at th esame time, gorgeous.
December 25, 2022
The most romantic, breathtaking poetry I have ever read. Millay is a master at capturing every aspect of love, and the yearning that goes with it.
December 18, 2024
This is who Rupi Kaur thinks she is... and it is disrespectful.
(Someone else please read these sonnets because I will go crazy, I love this collection)
(Someone else please read these sonnets because I will go crazy, I love this collection)
September 18, 2021
“This beast that rends me in the sight of all,
This love, this longing, this oblivious thing,
That has me under as the last leaves fall,
Will glut, will sicken, will be gone by spring.
The wound will heal, the fever will abate,
The knotted hurt will slacken in the breast;
I shall forget before the flickers mate
Your look that is today my east and west.
Unscathed, however, from a claw so deep
Though I should love again I shall not go:
Along my body, waking while I sleep,
Sharp to the kiss, cold to the hand as snow,
The scar of this encounter like a sword
Will lie between me and my troubled lord.”
This love, this longing, this oblivious thing,
That has me under as the last leaves fall,
Will glut, will sicken, will be gone by spring.
The wound will heal, the fever will abate,
The knotted hurt will slacken in the breast;
I shall forget before the flickers mate
Your look that is today my east and west.
Unscathed, however, from a claw so deep
Though I should love again I shall not go:
Along my body, waking while I sleep,
Sharp to the kiss, cold to the hand as snow,
The scar of this encounter like a sword
Will lie between me and my troubled lord.”
January 13, 2013
From the first instant (the 'fatal interview') the romance is fated to end in desolation. Millay, in 52 sonnets, captures the waves of emotion after the love affair has ended; her joy in her god-like lover, her willing powerlessness to emotion at the beginning, her rages against his falseness, she twists with desire and looking back, philosophizes on the follies of youth, appreciating her ex-lover with a quiet longing for the past. The humanity of her vacillations from dread and hate to bittersweet regret, from the desire and revelry of early days, to acceptance of loss give a picture of the gamut and intermixing of emotions involved in relationship and its end.
May 15, 2007
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.
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.
March 29, 2015
I found a copy (1st edition) of this book today while antiquing. It's in beautiful condition with the original dust jacket and such a deal for only four dollars. I'd never read Millay before and now I must say it's fate! For her gentle hand and lush, tactile quality to her loves she pens, I feel as if I've known each intimately. Fantastic find and a timeless treasure I'll forever keep.
December 4, 2007
oh my God
October 18, 2013
Beautiful collection of sonnets.
April 11, 2017
I think I prefer her lyrics to her sonnets, even though the sonnets are arguably the greater cause of her fame and appreciation.
December 30, 2016
Always well done, but a little depressing.
Dustin Renwick
Author, Beyond the Gray Leaf
Dustin Renwick
Author, Beyond the Gray Leaf
Read
October 16, 2017Needs to get over it and move on
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews