Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

TO STEEPLETOP WITH EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY 187

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 the 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.

Instead of Shakespeare ’s three quatrains capped by a couplet, the Italian son-
net form rhymes eight lines then six. An octave ’s worth of chagrin, running
on with only two rhyme sounds, turns toward the season, bolstering her story:
“Thus in the winter.. .” Nature certifies her pain, and we can see why Thomas
Hardy admired her so.
Meanwhile it ’s Shakespeare, as ever, at bottom. Not imitation but homage
ripens Millay’s lines, remembering hisbare tree, boughs, and birds:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

Nothing could match that astonishing metaphor, “Bare ruin’d choirs.” Skeptics
tax Millay’s diction and syntax as antiquated thus sentimental. But “What lips
my lips have kissed” ends on two perfect lines fusing her voice with the lost
season:

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

Stretching “summer” over the break “A little while,” then inverting “sang in
me” to “in me sings,” she turns up the fateful rhyme “no more.”
Much depends on tact and skill. Nothing antique, sentimental, or beautified
adorns a later poem, touching Millay’s most vexed affair. After a bluff, breath-
taking start, Maine ’s rockbound windbound scene takes over, filling up twelve
of fourteen lines in her staunchest sonnet.

Hearing your words, and not a word among them

Tuned to my liking, on a salty day

When inland woods were pushed by winds that flung them

Hissing to leeward like a ton of spray,

I thought how off Matinicus the tide

Came pounding in, came running through the Gut,

While from the Rock the warning whistle cried,