Edna St. Vincent Millay

Today's poem is actually a two-fer from Ms. Millay:

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;

Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It may well be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution's power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would.

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 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.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born February 22, 1892 in Maine. Encouraged by her mother, Millay began writing poetry at a very young age, and much of her early poetry was published in St. Nicholas, a popular children's magazine. However, she won immediate acclaim and attention with her poem, "Renascence," published in the anthology The Lyric Year, in 1912 when Millay was 20. It became the title poem for her first collection, published in 1917 (the same year she graduated from Vassar College), Renascence and Other Poems. This collection immediately established her as a force on the New York literary scene. Her further collections, along with her prose works, plays, short stories and essays, made her one of America's most celebrated poets.

Between 1917, when her first collection was published, and 1920, when her second was published, Edna St. Vincent Millay published 77 poems, 39 of which were sonnets (2 of those appear above). She also wrote and directed a play, published 8 prose pieces under a pseudonym, and wrote her second book. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 for A Few Figs from Thistles and for 8 sonnets and "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver." Millay's volume of work alone is noteworthy; however, the work she was producing was stunning. Her command of the sonnet is something which has been commented on by several other, award-winning, poets: "She wrote some of the best sonnets of the century. She knew that this form was durable. She put into it her own immaculate perfections" (emphasis added -- Richard Eberhart). Her verse "stings the page".