Wine from These Grapes by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Wine from These Grapes Reviews

• 
  Theo Logos

  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

  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

  I shall die but that is all I shall do for Death.
• 
  Ally Fesmire

  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

  “Yet shall be seen no more by mortal eyes
  Such beauty as here walked and here went down”
• 
  Edmund Davis-Quinn

  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

  Not her best. Not awful either. Just, meh.
  
  Dustin Renwick
  Author,
  Beyond the Gray Leaf
• 
  Tina

  My inspiration
• 
  Brian

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