Wine from These Grapes

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

no dust jacket slight fading to the hard cover

Genres: Poetry

91 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1934

About the author

Edna 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.

Reviews

[Julie G · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a funny concept, to think of myself as “reviewing” a collection of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poetry!

Hilarious, actually. I might as well review the water in the lake. Perhaps the algae?

The indomitable poet published this collection, WINE FROM THESE GRAPES, when she was 42. She would go on to live just 16 more years, but, of course, she didn't know that then.



Or did she? It feels like it. Even in her early forties, you can feel the autumnal quality of this verse.

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,
who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.

She seems to nail the quality of autumn that is so duplicitous, and a little absurd: as everything dies around us, we feel the most alive.

Time, doing this to me, may alter too
My anguish, into something I can bear.

I own approximately 80 collections of poetry, each one housed in a special bookshelf in my bedroom, because they would be the first inanimate objects I would save in a disaster.

Of them all, there are 4 poets who receive my constant, almost daily attention: Hafiz, EE Cummings, Ray Carver, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

They were not only some of our greatest technical poets; they were teachers and mystics, all, and you can read their verse over and over again, and find fresh meaning, and new perspectives, even on a daily basis.

The rye is vexed and thinned,
The wheat comes limping home,
By vetch and whiteweed harried, and the sandy bloom
Of the sour-grass; here
Dandelions,--and the wind
Will blow them everywhere.

Save there.
There
No flower.

[Theo Logos · Rating 5 out of 5]

The philosopher has said that it is the impermanence of life that gives it meaning and beauty. No poet has captured that terrible beauty as well or as often as has Millay. In Wine From These Grapes she sweeps through nature and the will of man, capturing its doomed, impermanent beauty, both leaf and tree:


The Leaf And The Tree

When will you learn, my self, to be
A dying leaf on a living tree?
Budding swelling, growing strong,
Wearing green, but not for long,
Drawing sustenance from the air,
The other leaves, and you not there,
May bud, and at the autumn’s call
Wearing russet, ready to fall?

Has not this trunk a deed to do
I guessed by small and tremulous you?
Shall not these branches in the end
To wisdom and the truth ascend?
And the great lightning plunging by
Look sidewise with a golden eye
To glimpse a tree so tall and proud
It sheds its leaves upon a cloud?

Here, I think, is the heart’s grief:
The tree, no mightier than the leaf,
Makes firm its root and spreads its crown
And stand; but in the end comes down.
That airy top no boy could climb
Is trodden in a little time
By cattle on their way to drink.
The fluttering thoughts a leaf can think.
That hear the wind and waits its turn,
Have taught it all a tree can learn.

Time can make soft that iron wood.
The tallest trunk that ever stood,
In time, without a dream to keep,
Crawls in beside the root to sleep.



There are so many powerful poems in this collection, most bearing some connection to the theme of death and impermanence. There is the haunting Childhood Is The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies, and the matter of fact The Solid Sprite Who Stands Alone. Some, like Aubade, are distilled, poignant beauty. Others, like Lines From A Gravestone, and Epitaph (bellow) are very nearly playful and jaunty:

Grieve not for happy Claudius, he is dead;
And empty is his skull.
Pity no longer, arm-in-arm with Dread,
Walks in that polished hall.

Joy too, is fled.
But no man can have all.


Conscientious Objector is a classic example of Millay’s defiance of inevitable Death, where she boldly declared:

I shall die, but that is all I will do for Death.

And in Apostrophe To Man and Two Sonnets In Memory (Nicola Sacco — Bartolommeo Vanzetti) Executed August 23, 1927, She decried the madness of death caused by war and injustice.

The volume closes with a selection of Millay’s incomparable sonnets. Here the cycle is named Epitaph For The Race Of Man and contains such sonnets as When Death was young and bleaching bones were few, O Earth, unhappy planet born to die, and When Man is gone and only gods remain. On a lighter note, this section also contains something I’d never before experienced in serious poetry - copulating dinosaurs!

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apostrophe to Man
(on reflecting that the world is ready to go to war again)
Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out.
Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build bombing air-planes;
Make speeches, unveil statues, issue bonds, parade;
Convert again into explosives the bewildered ammonia and the distracted cellulose;
Convert again into putrescent matter drawing flies
The hopeful bodies of the young; exhort,
Pray, pull long faces, be earnest, be all but overcome, be photographed;
Confer, perfect your formulae, commercialize
Bacteria harmful to human tissue,
Put death on the market;
Breed, crowd, encroach, expand, expunge yourself, die out,
Homo called sapiens.

[Joe Molenaar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I shall die but that is all I shall do for Death.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5, rounded up.

Wine from These Grapes, published in 1934, is the first poetry collection I've read by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The title comes from one of her earlier poems:

"Wine from these grapes I shall be treading surely
Morning and noon and night until I die.
Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die."
-The Buck in the Snow

It implies that life experiences leave stains that stay with us until we die, which reflects the theme of death and grieving in many of the poems in this volume. Their last few lines often have a curious combination of both melancholy and contentment, resignation and hope. "On the Wide Heath," about a weary traveler returning home:

...Home to the yellow light that shines within
The kitchen of a loud shrew,
Home over stones and sand, through stagnant
water
He goes, mile after mile
Home to a poaching son and a daughter
With a disdainful smile,
Home to the worn reproach, the disagreeing,
The shelter, the stale air; content to be
Pecked at, confined, encroached upon, - it being
Too lonely, to be free.


I knew very little about Millay, so I did a deep dive into her life and found her to be a very forward-thinking person ahead of her time. Another world war was brewing that she vehemently opposed and many of the poems included in this collection are harsh rebukes against war.

O Earth, unhappy planet born to die,
Might I your scribe and your confessor be,
What wonders must you not relate to me
Of Man, who when his destiny was high
Strode like the sun into the middle sky
And shone an hour, and who so bright as he,
And like the sun went down into the sea,
Leaving no spark to be remembered by.

The old and tattered book I read came from Thriftbooks and although not a first edition, it was published in 1934. There is a handwritten note in ink on the first blank page dated 1935 that says:

Many Happy Birthdays
to my sugar.
Craig

There were several poems that were underlined with ink, too. I can't explain exactly why, but this added to my reading experience.

[Ally Fesmire · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great fall re-read. I always think about it when the concord grapes start to come ripe. The language is lovely, but what really gets me is the ideas Edna plays with--so many of her images feel both startling but also very right.

This time I was struck by this line from "Conscientious Objector":
"I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death."

[Hannah Gadbois · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Yet shall be seen no more by mortal eyes
Such beauty as here walked and here went down”

[Stacie · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable collection in a small volume, so that it doesn’t take too many sittings to read through. Definitely not my favorite, but worth reading and pondering.

[Cora Linn · Rating 5 out of 5]

she gets it

[Omama. · Rating 3 out of 5]

“As men have loved their lovers in times past
And sung their wit, their virtue and their grace,
So have we loved sweet Justice to the last,
Who now lies here in an unseemly place.
The child will quit the cradle and grow wise
And stare on beauty till his senses drown;
Yet shall be seen no more by mortal eyes
Such beauty as here walked and here went down.
Like birds that hear the winter crying plain
Her courtiers leave to seek the clement south;
Many have praised her, we alone remain
To break a fist against the lying mouth
Of any man who says this was not so:
Though she be dead now, as indeed we know.”

[Edmund Davis-Quinn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty but didn't stick to my heart.

I am very particular with my poetry and this didn't grab me at all.

So it goes.

[Dustin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not her best. Not awful either. Just, meh.

Dustin Renwick
Author, Beyond the Gray Leaf

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice collection of Millay poems that inspired greater thought and analysis.

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

My inspiration

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

For once it was the lyrics that didn't grab me and the sonnets that really stood out.