186 PA RT T W O
One E. Vincent Millay submitted this poem in 1912 to a prestigious New York
competition. When the judges ranked it high but not among the prizewinners,
an outcry arose and her career took off. The literati lionized (and courted) her,
benefactors sent her to Vassar, her celebrity exploded with a quatrain.
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!Along with irony, her passion and womanly pride sent slim volumes into tens
of thousands of hands.
“I shall forget you presently, my dear,” one sonnet begins, and another, “Oh,
oh, you will be sorry for that word!” The form lent itself, and she bent it, to
her own wryness.
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind...Seasonal transience weaves into her mood.
Pity me not because the light of day
At close of day no longer walks the sky;
Pity me not for beauties passed away
From field and thicket as the year goes by.This bifocal view, nature and human loss, dates far back in our civilization,
as with François Villon’s “Ballad of the Ladies of Bygone Times”: Où sont les
neiges d’antan? “Where are the snows of yore?” Or Shakespeare ’s “Sap checked
with frost and lusty leaves quite gone, / Beauty o’ersnowed and bareness every
where.” Millay writes,
Love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales.While traditional meter marks her off from the Californian Robinson Jeffers,
whom she thought America’s best poet, Millay’s voice resounds on her own
seacoast: “tide that treads,” “Strewing fresh wreckage.”
At their finest, her sonnets join Millay with Shakespeare and Keats.
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,