Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892- 1950) had poems printed in St. Nicholas Magazine during her childhood on the coast of Maine, and published her first volume, “Renascence”, the year of her graduation from Vassar. The next five years she lived in the Greenwich Village section of New York City, supporting herself by writing stories under assumed names and acting with the Provincetown Players.
Serious critics condemned as flippant “A Few Figs from Thistles”, but the “gilded youth” of the twenties took it to their hearts. Her next volumes, “Second April”, “The Harp- Weaver”, and “The Buck in the Snow”, returned to the lyric vein of her earlier work and won wide popularity.
After her marriage she lived on a farm in New England. Her later books of poetry showed increasing concern with current issues but a corresponding decline in lyric appeal.
Flowing melody and an intense delight in the world of nature swept Edna Millay to fame with the poem “Renascence,” written when she was only nineteen, and the same qualities mark many of her short lyrics, such as “God’s World.” In other poems she dwells with equal intensity on the whole gamut of personal emotions, from the delicate wistfulness of “The Spring and the Fall” to the defiant grief of “Dirge Without Music.” Although she used a great variety of poetic patterns and also free verse, she achieved her finest expression in simple lyric forms and in the sonnets.
“Renascence” is written in traditional tetrameter couplets. It describes the poet’s dramatic spiritual awakening. The enclosed, childlike perspective of the opening section, “All I could see 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,” soon gives way to a heroic effort to attain new horizons: “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.” The young narrator subsequently experiences the sheer pressure of existence—“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” —and finds refuge in death, underground: “Into the earth I sank till I/ Full six feet under ground did lie / …so gladly dead.” A youthful will to live and the reviving power of nature in the form of “pitying rain,” however, recall the transformed poet, who can now cry, “God, I can push the grass apart/ and lay my finger on thy heart!” the heightened spiritual awareness gained by the imaginative experience is shown in the final stanza, which is starkly contrasting in perspective to the first: “The soul can split the sky in two, / And let the face of God shine through.”
In “Renascence”, Millay not only found her poetic voice, but also established the philosophical, intellectual, and spiritual foundations of her entire oeuvre. The principal themes of Millay’s poem are death and resurrection. Millay describes death and rebirth as a lived, felt experience. Millay conveys profound poetic, even mystical, experiences to the reader through her masterful use of suggestive yet simple language and compelling imagery.
Another poem of Millay is entitled “The Spring and the Fall.” There are lines that rhyme, an element which are present in all of Millay’s poems. In “God’s World,” “Lament,” and “Renascence,” rhyming of lines are vivid.
Millay also wrote “God’s World.” This poem has apostrophe. Millay addressed the “world” as if a human, but the term “world” in the poem is actually a non-human.
Personification is also an element present in the poem. The “woods” were said to have ached and sagged. Rhyme is also flamboyant in the poem: “O world, I cannot hold thee close enough! / Thy winds, thy wide gray skies! / Thy mists that roll and rise! / Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag/ And all but cry with color! That gaunt crag/ To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff! / World, world, I cannot get thee close enough!” Another element in this poem is its solemn tone. Millay was as if talking to God, telling Him that the world is “too beautiful.” Imagery is also used in the poem such as “wide gray skies,” and “mists that roll and rise.”
Like in “God’s World,” the tone of “The Spring and the Fall” is also sober. Millay uses the flow of time or seasons of each year as a metaphor for moments of love, a version that recounts the hung ups and mood swings in a relationship. There is a narrative element since the poem tells of events which happened in the love affair of the persona with his “dear.” The poem first mentions that “in the spring of the year” her love broke her “a bough of the blossoming peach.” The second stanza reveals to us that her love “broke her heart, in little ways.” And the final stanza relays to us that she is hurting.
This poem has rhyming words in almost every end of the line in each stanza which makes its rhythm nice sounding. Millay uses also alliteration in this poem: “He broke me a bough of the blossoming peach…”
Another poem of Millay is “Lament.” In this poem, she uses ordinary words. But the message is meaningful. The line “life must go on” which is repeated three times in the poem down to the end serves as the theme. The persona was telling her children that their “father is dead.” By telling that, Millay put the words together without much further ado. The lines are straightforwardly explains that poverty comes after the death of the children’s father. We read: “From his old coats/ I’ll make you little jackets; / I’ll make you little trousers/ From his old pants.” The belongings of a person who passed away should actually be kept and not to be recycled. The final line “I forget just why” gives good reason for its title. The persona grieves and as a consequence she becomes confused and does not know any reasons for going on with her life.
In “Dirge Without Music,” Millay beautifully made a poem telling that she is “not resigned” to death. There is irony in this poem while the persona is actually recounting that death comes to “the wise,” “the lovely,” “the tender,” “the kind,” “the witty,” “the brave” and all other people but the persona: But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” Alliteration is present in the lines: “With lilies and with laurel they go,” “be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.” And there is also rhyme scheme in this poem: “Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave/ Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; / Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. /I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
Millay is also well known in her day as a master of the sonnet. Many of her works showed great lyrical style in the Shakespearean sonnet form. This fixed form is characterized by the inclusion of two stanzas: the first being an octave with two quatrains; the second, a sestet composed of a quatrain and a couplet. The traditional themes of a sonnet usually revolve around the tormented lover. Millay perfected this “tormented lover” role in her sonnets.
In “Pity Me Not,” Millay uses the cyclical forces of nature as a metaphor for her version of the cycle of love, a version that concludes a man’s love for a woman always ends.
In the first two lines she looks at the sunset and one is reminded of the warmth love brings to life, warmth that naturally dies away as love fades. Next, she moves to beauty and the process of aging. As women get older, society often considers their beauty lost just as flowers wither as winter approaches. Millay seems to assume that men cannot love if the woman has no beauty left.
“The waning of the moon” can easily refer to the loss of romance and passion, since moonlight is often considered a sensuous setting. Finally, “the ebbing of the tide” washes away any remnants of romance. Passion’s tide will only go lower and lower from this point.
Millay finishes the octave directly tying up love to nature. Up to this point, love has not been explicitly addressed. Finally, she gets to the thrust of the poem, “Nor a man’s desire is hushed so soon, and you no longer look on love with me.” It is clear in this octave that Millay looks at the passing of love, the end of men’s desire, as a natural part of life. She seems resigned to it. She accepts it and declares, “Pity me not” the loss of precious things, for there is nothing else which could happen. With the tone of the octave, she clearly does not sound so much as a “tormented lover” as she does someone who has become completely jaded to love altogether. The torment is long finished.
As is common in many sonnets, the sestet introduces a new tone, a new twist to the narrative. In line 9, she tells directly that she indeed has gone through these stages of love enough to become resigned to the inevitable: “This love I have known always: love is no more.” Imagery is rich in this poem relating on the emotion of the woman like “fresh wreckage gathered in the gales.” The woman laments for she feels pain in her heart. She thought she was smarter than that but she succumbs to her emotions. And the paradox is the revelation: Pity her, her broken heart.
Basically, all of the poems of Millay have similarities in their themes. Major themes of Millay are inevitability of death and celebration of life or rebirth, for example, in “Renascence” “Dirge Without Music,” and “Lament.” She also wrote about love, particularly fleeting of affection in a relationship like “The Spring and the Fall” and “Pity Me Not.” She also wrote poems with some other elements such as imagery, alliteration, rhyme scheme, paradox, metaphor, irony and personification. But she mainly used ordinary words in expressing artistic messages in her poems. This makes her exceptional as a poet of the modern era.
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