TO STEEPLETOP WITH EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY 185once attracted Thoreau venturing into Maine wilderness. What ’s rare is her
touching memory for it all.
“All my childhood is in those bayberry-bushes, & queen-of-the-meadow,
or maybe you call it hardhack, & rose-hips. And cranberries—I remember a
swamp of them.” When the river near her house ran over and there was no heat,
the kitchen floor flooded and froze, so the sisters skated on it. “Another joy in
the tall grasses was when it was raining hard,” their mother recalls, the girls
“leaping about in the rain, letting the summer showers soak them.” “Earth-
ecstatic,” Edna calls herself. Traveling north of Bangor once, she saw “a big
snowy mountain” forty miles off and was told it ’s Katahdin, Maine ’s highest.
“Yes sir,” she writes home, “I’ve seen it! Beautiful!”
Long after she ’d moved to Manhattan and later settled upstate as a much-
prized love poet, the ocean still drew this “girl who had lived all her life at the
very tide-line of the sea.” “Exiled” is astir with surf, spray, tide, sand, seaweed,
driftwood, fog, gulls, mussels, shells, “green piles groaning... windy wooden
piers.” “Inland” calls up “water sucking the hollow ledges, / Tons of water
striking the shore,” and asks for “One salt smell of the sea once more.”
Of course no childhood is purely idyllic. The eldest of three sisters whose
single mother was an ill-paid visiting nurse often away from home, Millay had
constant chores on top of schoolwork. “The color—Oh—... I want to climb
Megunticook before the leaves are all gone. But I can’t. I’ve got to work—all
the time.” Yet her mother published poems in The Maine Farmer, taught her
to read via Shakespeare and Shelley, to sing and play piano. Edna loved Latin
poetry, edited her school magazine, and was a passionate actress with flaming
red hair and green eyes, red lips, white skin. “She had lots of spark and spunk,”
a school friend remembers, and was a “spitfire” against any injustice.
Too poor for college, Millay stayed home to work, and began “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.
Winter anguish presses down, then another hundred lines surge under cool
rain,
And as I looked a quickening gust
Of wind blew up to me and thrust
Into my face a miracle
Of orchard-breath.
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart!