| Title | : | Millay |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0307592669 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780307592668 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1923 |
This volume includes the early poems that many consider her best— “Renascence” and “The Ballad of the Harp Weaver” among them—as well as such often-memorized favorites as “What lips my lips have kissed” and “First Fig” (“My candle burns at both ends . . .”). The poet’s most famous verse drama, the one-act antiwar fable Aria da Capo, is included here as well.
Millay Reviews
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Millay’s brain is so large. The way she talks about love is unparalleled. Nobody else should even try to write sonnets anymore, she’s already done it but better.
Her strength really lies in her use of metre and rhyme, which further accentuates the beauty of anything she’s trying to say. It’s no wonder that she won a Pulitzer.
Overall this is an excellent collection of her poetry, but there were a loooooooot of nature poems which I just personally don’t vibe with, hence only 4 stars and not 5. I adored it, though, and Millay truly is That Bitch. -
Edna St. Vincent Millay
It's hard to avoid superlatives.
Edna St. Vincent Millay is without any doubts one of America's greatest poets. Everyone should read her poetry...even people who don't read poetry will enjoy Millay.
Everyman's Pocket Poets
I have a few of Everyman's Pocket Poets collections. Rabbie Burns, Edgar Allen Poe, Yeats and of course Edna St. Vincent Millay. I love them. They are proper pocket editions (smaller than a Kindle) that you can take with you anywhere and they are attractive. They're kind of perfect. -
"My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I'll not be knowing;
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
No matter where it's going" -
“Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand / Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand”
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Some melancholy, some gay, some silly, some serious. An excellent collection by an amazingly talented lady who won my heart a few years ago when I came upon a poem by her and was swept off my feet.
Here are just a few snippets, I realize that there seems to be a theme in these but I seriously just picked some of my favourite lines or there.
"--People dress and go to town;
I sit in my chair.
All my thoughts are slow and brown:
Standing up or sitting down
Little matters, or what gown
Or what shoes I wear."
"--So up I got in anger,
And took a book I had,
And put a ribbon on my hair
To please a passing lad.
And, "One thing there's no getting by -
I've been a wicked girl," said I;
"But if I can't be sorry, why,
I might as well be glad!"
"--But here, unhated for an hour,
The sorrel runs in ragged flame,
The daisy stands, a bastard flower,
Like flowers that bear an honest name."
"--I know a winter when it comes:
The leaves are listless on the boughs;
I watched your love a little while,
And brought my plants into the house."
"---And then adieu, - farewell! - the dream is done.
Yours is a face of which I can forget
The color and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set."
"--Laugh at the unshed leaf, say what you will,
Call me in all things what I was before,
A flutter in the wind, a woman still;
I tell you I am what I was and more." -
This volume starts with 'Renascence' and it was in reading that poem that I discovered what is now my favourite poem. It made me cry.
Millay's poems are just so fun to read, they definitely made poetry far less intimidating then it appeared to me previously. What follows is a whole selection of poems containing the most delightful rhyming couplets and little dittys. Some deep, some light, all of them bursting with wit.
I wasn't taken as much by the sonnets but I think that's only because I love an easy and obvious rhyme. That said, I really enjoyed the play Millay wrote, Aria Da Capo, and thought it was such a lovely way for this volume to end.
Throughout much of the volume, Millay makes fun of all of us, reminding us that the grass is always greener in the most entertaining way that you can't help but get a kick out of yourself. -
i am drunk and this was intensely lovely
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Excellent selection of Millay's poetry.
Here's one of her quotes that I relate to: "I love humanity; but I hate people."
And one of her poems:
Sorrow
Sorrow like a ceaseless rain
Beats upon my heart.
People twist and scream in pain, -
Dawn will find them still again;
This has neither wax nor wane,
Neither stop nor start.
People dress and go to town;
I sit in my chair.
All my thoughts are slow and brown:
Standing up or sitting down
Little matters, or what gown
Or what shoes I wear. -
Millay cannot find enough words to describe the purity and density of the feeling of love. But she has done her best, and her best is magnificent, vivid and colorful. The poems included carry the insufferable joy and pleasant weight of yearning and love, and will be much enjoyed by enthusiasts of the genre.
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I Dreamed I Moved Among The Elysian Fields
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.
Danai, 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. -
I walked past Millay's house in Greenwich Village over the summer, and diligently read the plaque, but forgot to then go read anything of hers. Remedying that in a Barnes & Noble, I was encouraged by an enthusiastic clerk, who said Millay is one of her favorite poets. I can see why, and will be finding more of her work in the future.
She also appears to have translated an edition of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, and that intrigues me. -
Amongst my favourite poetry ever.
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When a note is played and a nearby object reflects or vibrates the sound, we call it resonance.
When I read the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, I can feel my soul hum along. -
after reading this, Millay has become my favourite poet.
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I am so impressed with many of her poems. Maybe my favorite poet?
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Centellinato…
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I thought I'd update my review of this little book of poems by Edna Millay. Upon re-reading this piece I am left riveted but warmly comforted. Millay's poems are deeply existential but colourfully hopeful - a combination rarely to be found, I find. She offers no false consolation, merely flowering reality where it can be made so with apt poetic justification. Millay is by far the best poet I've ever read, and I hope, yes hope, that I have forgotten the verses and lines upon revisiting once again in the future to keep them as fresh and unrelenting as they were when they were first read.
You may enjoy my narration of my personal favourite poem of hers; "Renascence" over on my YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww66u... -
Beautiful sarcasm, wit, and feminism. Found myself doubting whether she really lived a hundred years ago. She could have written for SNL. Check out the poem about her not caring if her ex died, had he, she would have been more interested in the cleaning of her fur coat (a different dead carcass). However she wrote it ever so nicely.
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Millay is a gut punch wrapped in silver, and I love her for it.
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I have been reading this throughout the year. There are times when just a little poetry is comforting.
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Luminosa e fantasmagorica…
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My heart is what it was before,
A house where people come and go. -
This was quite delightful, not to mention gripping from the very start. The flap suggests her early poems are better than her later, with which assessment I’d be inclined to agree. She is an accurate mouthpiece of that weird early twentieth century feeling of not quite being modern but not quite being not, either, which is present in the clear struggle she has with religion and belief in God. The poems about suicide and hell (particularly the ones where she’s saving a flower from the apocalypse, and searching the afterlife for Silence) are remarkable.
The only critique I have is that her form is somewhat wanting. I find the sonnets (although there are a few in my faves) to be the most lacking and airless. Then again, after Auden, everyone is lacking.
Renascence
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
and
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That cannot keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat – the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.
Interim
So short a time
To teach my life its transposition to
This difficult and unaccustomed key! –
The room is as you left it; your last touch –
A thoughtless pressure, knowing not itself
As saintly – hallows now each simple thing
and
I think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof
In some firm fabric, woven in and out;
Your golden filaments in fair design
Across my duller fibre. And today
The shining strip is rent; the exquisite
Fine pattern is destroyed; part of your heart
Aches in my breast; part of my heart lies chilled
In the damp earth with you. I have been torn
In two, and suffer for the rest of me.
The Suicide
But as for tasks –” he smiled, and shook his head;
“Thou hadst thy tast, and laidst it by,” he said.
OUCH.
The Tavern
But all the good I know
Was taught me out of two grey eyes
A long time ago.
To Kathleen
Beauty that may not die as long
As there are flowers and you and song.
The Philosopher
I know a man that’s a braver man
And twenty men as kind,
And what are you, that you should be
The one man in my mind?
Yet women’s ways are witless ways,
As any sage will tell. –
And what am I, that I should love
So wisely and so well?
Shades of Dorothy Parker!
Lament
Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why.
And again.
Exiled
Wanting the sticky, salty sweetness
Of the strong wind and shattered spray;
Wanting the loud sound and the soft sound
Of the big surf that breaks all day.
Spring
Life it itself
Is nothing.
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
The Blue-Flag in the Bog
Held Earth naught to save souls of sinners
Worth the saving from a fire?
Elegy before Death
Oh, there will pass with your great passing
Little of beauty not your own, -
Only the light from common water,
Only the grace from simple stone!
Favourites: Witch Wife; First Fig; Second Fig; The Singing Woman from the Wood’s Edge; Sonnet II; Weeds; To a poet that died young; Wraith; Ebb; Sonnet V; Sonnet VII; I know I am but summer to your heart; What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why. -
In this collection, some poems last for pages; some consist of a few lines. Millay usually uses both rhythm and rhyme, which I love, as the lines ring in my ears and lock into place cleverly like puzzle pieces. I had forgotten that among her body of work are sonnets--which are both intelligent and hot-blooded, which give a kick if you set your mind to them. My favorite Millay poem is unusual for her in that it is free-verse. If you have not read Spring, please do.
Why I enjoy Millay's poetry, in sum: In life, perception is not always candy-coated. Life can feel raw. It helps to have language to think through these times.
On a carefree day, it can be hard to read and feel the weight of some of these poems. On an intense day, for me it is hard to find a peer to Millay as an emotional travel guide. She skillfully uses language to express wildness, giving it form, meaning, and beauty. -
These were hit or miss for me. The hits really hit (renascence, Grown ups, song of a second April, the unexplorer, the ballad of the harp weaver) but the misses really missed; they were mind ambling like reading the mad hatter poetry/plays.
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A perfect compilation of Edna St Vincent Millay's best poems, which are beguiling and beautiful.
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Read the poetry before you read the introduction. The intro will ruin it.
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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;
