Renascence and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I know only that I am not shy about stealing (with accreditation) a line or two of hers in my own attempts at poetry. I don’t know enough about formal poetry to critique style or meter by any standard. Renascence & Other Poems was the first published collection of her poems. Have we not all felt like this, or something akin? What romantic heart of any age could not respond to the loneliness in this line, or the lines after. Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Vincent Millay is among those poets, besides Shakespeare, who lit my adolescent fire for poetry. There is always something fresh, something new, in it- some new understanding, some new and wondrous appreciation for a metaphor, image. More often than not, that memory will lead you back to rereading the poem in its entirety. In a quiet moment, a line will be remembered with a clarity that is almost painful in its beauty. The sought-for truth, no heads of women slainįor greed like yours, no writhings of distress,Īn empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.įirst, let me state my personal conviction that you never finish a good poem. So enter now, and see for what slight thing THIS door you might not open, and you did The most striking sonnet here is number VI, wherein she reimagined the story of Bluebeard, not as murderousness revealed, but as trust and privacy breached.

She follows with several, brilliant shorter poems, including Tavern and the above mentioned Witch Wife.Īs would become her tradition, the collection closed with several sonnets. O world, I cannot hold thee close enough! Millay broke the gloom of these two long poems with the exuberance of God’s World. They drone on too long, and their tone struck me as being more akin to juvenile Goth culture than to Millay’s later, far more mature poems of death. I love many of Millay’s poems of death, one of her constant themes, but these two early offering miss the mark. (The three together make up two thirds of this slim volume.) Death is the theme of both. Interim and The Suicide follow Renascence, and like it, they are long poems. It is unique among the Millay poems I have read, and though far from my favorite, it may be the most intriguing of her work. Written when she was just twenty and submitted to a national contest, it was the poem that first brought her national recognition and critical acclaim. The title poem, Renascence, is odd and fascinating, many pages long. Already in this, her earliest collection, she had posted a largely unheeded warning to all the many suitors who would try and fail to posses her. Millay clearly was describing herself, both physically and spiritually. Those concluding lines from Witch Wife, the jewel of this collection, were an early warning.

Renascence and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay