Vincent, as she was known to her family, has long been one of my very favorites–what can I say, I love me a sonnet!–and trying to decide on which of her works to share took me far too long.
When she’s not being arch and clever (as in First Fig), or painting artless, evocative portraits of what was or what might be (read I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed), she writes poems brimming with feeling–passion, fury, soul-ache–that never spill over into mess or pathos. Her facility with deceptively simple language creates a marvelous cage for the wildest birds of emotion, and the tension between the smooth surfaces and churning depths never fails to move me.
And so, I had to choose…
Sonnet V: If I should learn
If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again–
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man–who happened to be you–
At noon to-day had happened to be killed,
I should not cry aloud–I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place–
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face,
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.
I love this one too! The twinning of melancholy, grief, loneliness, and the mundane… so touching.
Thank you for sharing this.
Millay’s selected works is the only poetry book I own. Most poets I cannot understand or relate to at all, but Millay’s poems have always resonated with me.
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Question: I once read in an awesome anthology of feminist literary criticism (The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter) something about Edna St. Vincent Millay. I’m going to quote it (I just went to look it up–it’s in Alicia Ostriker’s essay “The Thieves of Language” Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking” on page 317 in my edition).
[blah blah some stuff about Keats and Apollo] “who then dies into immortal life with a scream: that is revisionist mythmaking. (The same scream, by the way, tears through the young throat of Edna St. Vincent Millay, in a poem many women loved as girls and later learned to despise; “Renascence,” too, is a poem about the genesis of a poet.)”
So, I looked up the poem–had never read any of her stuff before–and I was like, Wait, why would girls love this and then learn to hate it when they got old? Am I missing something?
I mean, it’s embarrassingly difficult for me to read poems that were written after the 17th century. So I could be missing something. But I can’t figure it out. Can anyone clarify this for me?
Wow, Cim, I don’t know quite what to tell you about that, since I don’t know a lot of girls who read much poetry that didn’t come in the liner notes to a music recording.
But I do know that “Renascence” is very early, written when Millay was herself a teen, and I’ve never really cared for it, partly because it’s very sing-song-y, like she’s channeling lesser Poe, and partly because it’s exactly what her (later) sonnets are not: wild breast-beating, adolescent keening. With lots! of exclamation! points! It’s not altogether bad, but it doesn’t have the fine-ness and control and depth that her later work has. It’s all on the surface.
But then I never really liked Keats, either. Another adolescent certain that he’s the only one who ever experienced deep feeling…
For a wonderful read, check out “Savage Beauty,” Vincent’s biography by Nancy Milford.
Oh, Adrienne, it IS. I read that back to back with Epstein’s What Lips My Lips Have Kissed some years ago. Quite the double-play.
Oh Dork, I love Edna St. Vincent Millay!
I don’t have much to add except an enthusiastic thumbs up!
Beautiful.
I really love that photo, too.