Collected Poems Read online

  What’s this of death, from you who never will die?

  I see so clearly now my similar years

  Your face is like a chamber where a king

  The light comes back with Columbine; she brings

  Lord Archer, Death, whom sent you in your stead?

  Loving you less than life, a little less

  I, being born a woman and distressed

  What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why

  Still will I harvest beauty where it grows

  How healthily their feet upon the floor

  Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare

  Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree

  So she came back into his house again

  The last white sawdust on the floor was grown

  She filled her arms with wood, and set her chin

  The white bark writhed and sputtered like a fish

  A wagon stopped before the house; she heard

  Then cautiously she pushed the cellar door

  One way there was of muting in the mind

  She let them leave their jellies at the door

  Not over-kind nor over-quick in study

  She had forgotten how the August night

  It came into her mind, seeing how the snow

  Tenderly, in those times, as though she fed

  From the wan dream that was her waking day

  She had a horror he would die at night

  There was upon the sill a pencil mark

  The doctor asked her what she wanted done

  Gazing upon him now, severe and dead

  From The Buck in the Snow

  Life, were thy pains as are the pains of hell

  Grow not too high, grow not too far from home

  Not that it matters, not that my heart’s cry

  Country of hunchbacks!—where the strong, straight spine

  Upon this marble bust that is not I

  For this your mother sweated in the cold

  Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease!

  Fatal Interview

  What thing is this that, built of salt and lime

  This beast that rends me in the sight of all

  No lack of counsel from the shrewd and wise

  Nay, learned doctor, these fine leeches fresh

  Of all that ever in extreme disease

  Since I cannot persuade you from this mood

  Night is my sister, and how deep in love

  Yet in an hour to come, disdainful dust

  When you are dead, and your disturbing eyes

  Strange thing that I, by nature nothing prone

  Not in a silver casket cool with pearls

  Olympian gods, mark now my bedside lamp

  I said, seeing how the winter gale increased

  Since of no creature living the last breath

  My worship from this hour the Sparrow-Drawn

  I dreamed I moved among the Elysian fields

  Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart

  Shall I be prisoner till my pulses stop

  My most distinguished guest and learned friend

  Think not, nor for a moment let your mind

  Gone in good sooth you are: not even in dream

  Now by this moon, before this moon shall wane

  I know the face of Falsehood and her tongue

  Whereas at morning in a jeweled crown

  Peril upon the paths of this desire

  Women have loved before as I love now

  Moon, that against the lintel of the west

  When we are old and these rejoicing veins

  Heart, have no pity on this house of bone

  Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

  When we that wore the myrtle wear the dust

  Time, that is pleased to lengthen out the day

  Sorrowful dreams remembered after waking

  Most wicked words!-forbear to speak them out

  Clearly my ruined garden as it stood

  Hearing your words, and not a word among them

  Believe, if ever the bridges of this town

  You say: “Since life is cruel enough at best”

  Love me no more, now let the god depart

  You loved me not at all, but let it go

  I said in the beginning, did I not?

  O ailing Love, compose your struggling wing!

  Summer, be seen no more within this wood

  If to be left were to be left alone

  I know my mind and I have made my choice

  Even in the moment of our earliest kiss

  Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly

  Now by the path I climbed, I journey back

  There is a well into whose bottomless eye

  The heart once broken is a heart no more

  If in the years to come you should recall

  Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave

  From Wine from These Grapes

  As men have loved their lovers in times past

  Where can the heart be hidden in the ground

  From Huntsman, What Quarry?

  Enormous moon, that rise behind these hills

  Now let the mouth of wailing for a time

  Thou famished grave, I will not fill thee yet

  Now that the west is washed of clouds and clear

  I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex

  When did I ever deny, though this was fleeting

  Be sure my coming was a sharp offense

  Not only love plus awful grief

  If there were balm in Gilead, I would go

  Count them unclean, these tears that turn no mill

  See how these masses mill and swarm

  His stalk the dark delphinium

  No further from me than my hand

  Upon this age, that never speaks its mind

  My earnestness, which might at first offend

  From Make Bright the Arrows

  I must not die of pity; I must live

  How innocent of me and my dark pain

  From Wine from These Grapes

  Epitaph for the Race of Man

  Before this cooling planet shall be cold

  When Death was young and bleaching bones were few

  Cretaceous bird, your giant claw no lime

  O Earth, unhappy planet born to die

  When Man is gone and only gods remain

  See where Capella with her golden kids

  He heard the coughing tiger in the night

  Observe how Miyanoshita cracked in two

  He woke in terror to a sky more bright

  The broken dike, the levee washed away

  Sweeter was loss than silver coins to spend

  Now forth to meadow as the farmer goes

  His heatless room the watcher of the stars

  Him not the golden fang of furious heaven

  Now sets his foot upon the eastern sill

  Alas for Man, so stealthily betrayed

  Only the diamond and the diamond’s dust

  Here lies, and none to mourn him but the sea

  From Mine the Harvest

  Those hours when happy hours were my estate

  Not, to me, less lavish—though my dreams have been splendid

  Tranquility at length, when autumn comes

  And is indeed truth beauty?—at the cost

  To hold secure the province of Pure Art

  And if I die, because that part of me

  It is the fashion now to wave aside

  Admetus, from my marrow’s core I do

  What chores these churls do put upon the great

  I will put Chaos into fourteen lines

  Come home, victorious wounded!—let the dead

  Read history: so learn your place in Time

  Read history: thus learn how small a space

  My words that once were virtuous and expressed

  Now sits the autumn cricket in the grass

  And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you

  If
I die solvent—die, that is to say

  Grief that is grief and properly so hight

  Felicity of Grief!—even Death being kind

  What rider spurs him from the darkening east

  Index of Titles and First Lines

  Photos, Letters & More . . .

  About the book

  About the author

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  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  The first edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Collected Poems was published in 1956 by the poet’s younger sister Norma, who served as Millay’s literary executor from 1950 until her death in 1986 at age ninety-two. A devoted “keeper of the flame,” Norma had previously published Mine the Harvest (1954), a selection of poems written from 1939 to 1950, and several unpublished early poems she discovered, scrawled in longhand, in Millay’s writing notebooks.

  In the nine books of poetry Millay published in her lifetime, the lyrics were placed at the beginning of the book, the sonnets at the end. (The exception is Fatal Interview, which is comprised of sonnets only.) In editing Collected Poems, Norma created a similar arrangement: the book begins with the lyrics from individual books, reprinted in chronological order, followed by the sonnets. This new edition, which preserves Norma’s ordering system, also includes an index of titles and first lines and several other new features.

  A thirty-two-page P.S. section provides the reader with a richly textured introduction to Millay’s life and the inspiration for her work. It includes a biographical critical essay, a collection of photographs from the Millay Society archives, and excerpts from the poet’s personal letters to family, friends, and her beloved editor Cass Canfield, chairman of the board of Harper & Brothers.

  “The faults as well as the virtues of this poetry are my own,” Millay wrote to Mr. Canfield in 1946. The virtues of her work have defied the differences in generations, and her poems—often traditional in form but timeless in their message—continue to attract an ever-expanding audience of readers.

  Elizabeth Barnett and Holly Peppe

  Literary Executors, Edna St. Vincent Millay

  New York City, December 2010

  From Renascence

  Renascence

  All I could see from where I stood

  Was three long mountains and a wood;

  I turned and looked another way,

  And saw three islands in a bay.

  So with my eyes I traced the line

  Of the horizon, thin and fine,

  Straight around till I was come

  Back to where I’d started from;

  And all I saw from where I stood

  Was three long mountains and a wood.

  Over these things I could not see:

  These were the things that bounded me.

  And I could touch them with my hand,

  Almost, I thought, from where I standi

  And all at once things seemed so small

  My breath came short, and scarce at all.

  But, sure, the sky is big, I said:

  Miles and miles above my head.

  So here upon my back I’ll lie

  And look my fill into the sky.

  And so I looked, and after all,

  The sky was not so very tall.

  The sky, I said, must somewhere stop . . .

  And—sure enough!—I see the top!

  The sky, I thought, is not so grand;

  I ’most could touch it with my hand!

  And reaching up my hand to try,

  I screamed, to feel it touch the sky.

  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.

  I saw and heard, and knew at last

  The How and Why of all things, past,

  And present, and forevermore.

  The Universe, cleft to the core,

  Lay open to my probing sense,

  That, sickening, I would fain pluck thence

  But could not,—nay! but needs must suck

  At the great wound, and could not pluck

  My lips away till I had drawn

  All venom out.—Ah, fearful pawn:

  For my omniscience paid I toll

  In infinite remorse of soul.

  All sin was of my sinning, all

  Atoning mine, and mine the gall

  Of all regret. Mine was the weight

  Of every brooded wrong, the hate

  That stood behind each envious thrust,

  Mine every greed, mine every lust.

  And all the while, for every grief,

  Each suffering, I craved relief

  With individual desire;

  Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire

  About a thousand people crawl;

  Perished with each,—then mourned for all!

  A man was starving in Capri;

  He moved his eyes and looked at me;

  I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,

  And knew his hunger as my own.

  I saw at sea a great fog bank

  Between two ships that struck and sank;

  A thousand screams the heavens smote;

  And every scream tore through my throat.

  No hurt I did not feel, no death

  That was not mine; mine each last breath

  That, crying, met an answering cry

  From the compassion that was I.

  All suffering mine, and mine its rod;

  Mine, pity like the pity of God.

  Ah, awful weight! Infinity

  Pressed down upon the finite Me!

  My anguished spirit, like a bird,

  Beating against my lips I heard;

  Yet lay the weight so close about

  There was no room for it without.

  And so beneath the weight lay I

  And suffered death, but could not die.

  Long had I lain thus, craving death,

  When quietly the earth beneath

  Gave way, and inch by inch, so great

  At last had grown the crushing weight,

  Into the earth I sank till I

  Full six feet under ground did lie,

  And sank no more,—there is no weight

  Can follow here, however great.

  From off my breast I felt it roll,

  And as it went my tortured soul

  Burst forth and fled in such a gust

  That all about me swirled the dust.

  Deep in the earth I rested now.

  Cool is its hand upon the brow

  And soft its breast beneath the head

  Of one who is so gladly dead.

  And all at once, and over all

  The pitying rain began to fall;

  I lay and heard each pattering hoof

  Upon my lowly, thatched roof,

  And seemed to love the sound far more

  Than ever I had done before.

  For rain it hath a friendly sound

  To one who’s six feet under ground;

  And scarce the friendly voice or face,

  A grave is such a quiet place.

  The rain, I said, is kind to come

  And speak to me in my new home.

  I would I were alive again

  To kiss the fingers of the rain,

  To drink into my eyes the shine

  Of
every slanting silver line,

  To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze

  From drenched and dripping apple-trees.

  For soon the shower will be done,

  And then the broad face of the sun

  Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth

  Until the world with answering mirth

  Shakes joyously, and each round drop