Our last column revisited e.e. cummings, one of two poets who lived in Greenwich Village in its glory days. Today we revisit the other—Edna St. Vincent Millay. But let’s not forget that Millay also had a home that she loved in the Berkshires.
Harvey Mountain sits astride the boundary line separating New York from Massachusetts. On the New York side is the large estate called “Steepletop” where Edna St. Vincent Millay (1992-1950), once America’s most popular poet, lived and is buried. On the other side of the mountain, less than a mile away, is West Stockbridge. Given this geography, I am quite comfortable in including Millay among the great literary figures who have brought distinction to the Berkshires.
Vincent, as she liked to call herself, was a very special person. She was named for a hospital (St. Vincent’s in Greenwich Village); she resided for a time in the narrowest house in New York (9 and ½ feet wide); she was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry; she rivaled Robert Frost as America’s greatest-ever writer of sonnets; and amidst the Flaming Youth of the 1920’s she colorfully lived out her own poem:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
Vincent and her two sisters were born and raised in Maine. Her family was poor, but a determined mother encouraged her daughter’s talents as a budding poet (and accomplished pianist), and her juvenile poems were in print from her early teens. Vincent was twenty-one before enough money was found for her to go to college (Vassar), but by that time she had written and had published a break-through poem, “Renascence,” that soon made her a semi-celebrity in literary New York.
“Renascence” is an extraordinary piece, describing an ecstatic experience that extends the boundaries of individual perception.
I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky,
The ticking of Eternity.
Small sidebar: Before there was a Johnny Carson, there was Dave Garroway, host of one of television’s first magazine shows. He made it a practice to sign off each program with this quote from “Renascence:”
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
After Vassar, Vincent hurried off to New York and immediately established herself as a guiding spirit for the Bohemians of Greenwich Village. She became an actress at the now legendary Provincetown Playhouse and wrote a play for them, “Aria da Capo,” that is still performed. When her candle-burns-at-both-ends poem was published, it became the anthem for the Villagers and a personal modus operandi for Vincent. She combined poetry with a free-wheeling sexual life, some of it meaningful but much of it casual.
And if I loved you Wednesday,
Well, what is that to you?
I do not love you Thursday—
So much is true.
And why you come complaining
Is more than I can see.
I loved you Wednesday,—yes—but what
Is that to me?
After eight vibrant Village years, Vincent started to settle and married a successful coffee importer from Holland who purchased for her the Steepletop estate where she centered the rest of her life. In addition to her writing, she made a fine living touring the country performing her own works — she had a mesmerizing alto voice — but Steepletop became her ultimate refuge.
* * *
Throughout her career Millay embraced the 14 line sonnet form and became a masterful practitioner, writing dozens of them. Many she used for personal reflection.
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
And, a rarity among America’s name-above-title poets, Millay was commissioned to write an opera, and “The King’s Henchman” was premiered to great acclaim by the Metropolitan Opera in 1927 (music by Deems Taylor). In a Verdi/Puccini world populated by Italian realism, Millay unexpectedly derived her libretto from an “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” written during the 9th century during the reign of Alfred the Great. From a generally gentle poet, here was her astonishingly powerful opening:
Wild as the white waves
Rushing and roaring,
Heaving the wrack
High up the headland;
Hoarse as the howling
Winds of the winter.
When the lean wolves
Harry the hindmost,
Horseman and horse
Toppled and tumbled;
So at the town gate,
Stroke upon stroke,
Sledging and slaying,
Swashes the sword,
Shivers the shield
Of foeman and kinsman:
Such was the fight!
Millay wrote often about death, and at one point Macmillan, the publishers, wouldn’t take her latest book because of its death themes:
Butterflies are white and blue
In this field we wander through.
Suffer me to take your hand.
Death comes in a day or two.
All the things we ever knew
Will be ashes in that hour:
Mark the transient butterfly,
How he hangs upon the flower.
Suffer me to take your hand.
Suffer me to cherish you
Till the dawn is in the sky.
Whether I be false or true,
Death comes in a day or two.
And Death came to Millay late one October night in 1950 when, alone at Steepletop, she pitched down a dark flight of stairs and was found dead the next day. She was 58 years old. Beside her on the landing was a notebook with these lines:
I will control myself, or go inside.
I will not flaw perfection with my grief.
Handsome, this day, no matter who has died.
Her candle had not lasted the night.
* * *
But perhaps we should end this column on a happier remembrance. In her heyday, Vincent regularly turned down lovers who wished to marry her, and there were quite a few. She likened them to her publishers: “Although I reject their proposals, I welcome their advances.”
Thomas Hardy, the British novelist and poet, once said that there were two great things in the United States: our skyscrapers and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Here is a selection of Millay’s poems performed by Valerie Harper and three members of the First Poetry Quartet: Jill Tanner, George Backman and Cynthia Herman.
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
