The Selected Poetry Of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Language: English
Pages: 67
ISBN: 0375761233
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"These are the poems that made Edna St. Vincent Millay's reputation when she was young. Saucy, insolent, flip, and defiant, her little verses sting the page," writes Nancy Milford in the Introduction to The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. As one of America's most beloved poets--and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923--Millay defined a generation with her intoxicating voice of liberation. Most remembered for her passionate, lyrical voice and mastery of the sonnet form, Millay explores love, death, and nature in her poetry while deftly employing allusions to the classical and the romantic. In 1917, at the age of twenty, she burst onto the New York literary scene with the publication of her first book of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems, which is included in this volume.
Edited by Millay biographer Nancy Milford, The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay also includes the collections A Few Figs from Thistles and Second April, as well as "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" and eight of Millay's sonnets from the early twenties.
And Sappho is a roving dust; Cressid could love again; Dido, Rotted in state, is restless still; You leave me much against my will. THE PHILOSOPHER And what are you that, wanting you, I should be kept awake As many nights as there are days With weeping for your sake? And what are you that, missing you, As many days as crawl I should be listening to the wind And looking at the wall? I know a man that’s a braver man And twenty men as kind, And what are you, that you should be The
dragging day,—sharp underfoot And hot, and like dead mist the dry dust hangs— But far, oh, far as passionate eye can reach, And long, ah, long as rapturous eye can cling, The world is mine: blue hill, still silver lake, Broad field, bright flower, and the long white road A gateless garden, and an open path: My feet to follow, and my heart to hold. EEL-GRASS No matter what I say, All that I really love Is the rain that flattens on the bay, And the eel-grass in the cove; The
THE LITTLE HILL Oh, here the air is sweet and still, And soft’s the grass to lie on; And far away’s the little hill They took for Christ to die on. And there’s a hill across the brook, And down the brook’s another; But, oh, the little hill they took,— I think I am its mother! The moon that saw Gethsemane, I watch it rise and set; It has so many things to see, They help it to forget. But little hills that sit at home So many hundred years, Remember Greece, remember Rome, Remember
The flowers of the dead; The red anemone that with no sound Moves in the wind, and from another wound That sprang, the heavily-sweet blue hyacinth, That blossoms underground, And sallow poppies, will be dear to her. And will not Silence know In the black shade of what obsidian steep Stiffens the white narcissus numb with sleep? (Seed which Demeter’s daughter bore from home, Uptorn by desperate fingers long ago, Reluctant even as she, Undone Persephone, And even as she set out again
before her. For they were reciting “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver”—badly, maybe, but by heart surely. NANCY MILFORD is the author of Savage Beauty, an iconic portrait of the extraordinary private life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her previous book, Zelda, was a number one New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She lives in New York. RENASCENCE AND OTHER POEMS RENASCENCE All I could see from where I stood Was three long mountains and a