THENEWYORKER,M AY16, 2022 75
ach aches, hangovers, nerve pain in her
shoulder and back, exhaustion.
If Millay was a consummate per-
former, entrancing suitors and selling
out lecture halls, the diaries are a record
of life offstage. After her marriage, in
1923, her days were quiet—sometimes
dull and sometimes lovely—though pe-
riodically interrupted by the demands
of the public, which threatened to with-
draw its affections as literary tastes
changed. The diaries do not give us
much insight into Millay’s loves and
love poems. But they do offer a com-
pelling portrait of what it’s like to live
in a mortal, aging body, in a society that
insists that its female stars remain beau-
tiful and forever young.
M
illay never really had a chance to
be a child. Born in 1892 in Rock-
land, Maine, Vincent, as she was known
throughout her childhood, was the el-
dest of three daughters. Her mother,
Cora, a travelling nurse with an artistic
streak, divorced her children’s dissolute
father in 1901. For a few years, she and
the girls moved around New England
before finally settling in Camden, Maine,
where they rented a small house in “the
‘bad’ section of town,” as Millay later
described it. Starting when Millay was
nine, Cora would leave home for weeks
at a time, while Millay ran the house-
hold and cared for her sisters. Cora nur-
tured Millay’s literary inclinations; when
she wasn’t travelling, she read Longfel-
low’s “Hiawatha” to her daughter. Soon,
Millay was sending poems to the chil-
dren’s publication St. Nicholas and win-
ning cash prizes of five dollars.
Despite the stereotype, poetry and
poverty are often incompatible. After
Millay graduated from high school, she
faced a rather dreary adult life. College
was cost-prohibitive, so she began work-
ing twelve-hour days at home, cleaning,
cooking, washing, and ironing. Her cre-
ativity went slack. “I’m getting old and
ugly,” she wrote in her diary in October,
- “I can feel my face dragging down.
I can feel the lines coming underneath
my skin....I love beauty more than any-
thing else in the world and I can’t take
time to be pretty.” At nineteen, she was
lonely. She began writing in her diary
to an imaginary lover, and their fantasy
assignations broke up the monotony.
It was under these conditions that
Millay began to compose “Renascence,”
the poem that would change her life. In
twenty stanzas of rhyming tetrameter,
Millay describes a crisis of faith: a speaker,
cramped by a sense of the physical world’s
finitude, is suddenly overcome by the
forces of “Infinity” and “Eternity,” dies,
is buried, longs to return to the world
aboveground, and then is reborn with a
renewed sense of the soul’s capacious-
ness. When the poem was published, in
1912, in the anthology “The Lyric Year,”
readers were struck by the maturity of
its themes. The poet Arthur Ficke, who
would become one of Millay’s long-term
lovers, wrote to the anthology’s editor
in disbelief: “No sweet young thing of
twenty ever ended a poem precisely
where this one ends: it takes a brawny
male of forty-five to do that.”
For all its precocity, the poem can
also be understood as a young woman’s
effort to reckon with the limitations of
a stifling life in Maine. “Renascence”
opens with the speaker gazing upon
three mountains, like the ones Millay
had been climbing all her life:
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.
The repetition at the beginning and the
end reinforces the sense of claustropho-
bia: the speaker is trapped in familiar ter-
ritory. But, after she’s reborn, the same
landscape delights her: “About the trees
my arms I wound/Like one gone mad I
hugged the ground.” It’s as if Millay were
reconciling herself to her circumstances—
and realizing, perhaps, that the broader
world might be more than she could bear.
She soon had a chance to see for her-
self. After Millay recited “Renascence”
at a party, one of the guests, impressed
by her poise, offered to connect her with
friends who could pay her way through
Vassar. Millay enrolled in the fall of 1913,
and threw herself into campus life, at-
tending parties, starring in plays, and
dating several of her wealthier class-
mates. (Vassar was all female, and ro-
mances between young women were
common at the time.) She was also re-
bellious, skipping class to write poems
and leaving the Poughkeepsie cam-
pus—a “hellhole,” she called it—with-
out permission. Most of the time, her
brilliant work saved her from formal
sanction; when it didn’t, friends came
to her rescue. In 1917, at the end of Mil-
lay’s senior year, the faculty voted to sus-
pend her indefinitely. More than a hun-
dred classmates signed a petition, and
she was allowed to graduate on time.
For Epstein, Millay was, at this point,
like a “princess in a fairytale,” scooped
from the ashes and set down among the
cultural élite. The diaries, however, show
not a princess but a tired young woman
with a sensitive stomach: she would run
herself ragged trying to write, study, and
socialize, and eventually end up “sick
abed all day.” This pattern—taking on
too many commitments, then suffering
the physical consequences—would con-
tinue for the rest of her life. Some have
seen here evidence of Millay’s frailty or
hypochondria, others her need to be
fussed over and adored. But gaining ad-
oration—putting her talent and charm
to dazzling effect—had brought Millay
to college, bought her food and dresses,
and won her scholarships. It may well
have seemed worth the hangover.
O
nly six months after graduation,
Millay was once again close to
broke. She was living with her sister
Norma in New York, in a small, cold
apartment on West Ninth Street; the
pipes froze, as did the flowers Millay
brought home to beautify the space. She
was acting and writing poems, but the
sisters often relied on male suitors to
buy their dinners.
In early 1918, Millay wrote to the ed-
itor of Poetry, Harriet Monroe, and asked
her for advance payment on several
poems the magazine planned to pub-
lish: “First Fig,” “Second Fig,” and “The
Penitent,” among others. The poems
appeared in June. “First Fig,” which
Norma later called “the most quoted
and misquoted quatrain in America,”
made Millay’s reputation:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
Millay had adopted a carpe-diem
attitude—historically, the province of
