192 PA RT T W O
Nature speaks for human trouble—this ancient thought draws her close to
home. The sun will no longer rise for us “Out of the glittering bay, / And
the warm winds be blown inward from the sea.” Anguished, her voice turns
medieval in its animism of nature:
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.Sacco and Vanzetti, electrocuted the next night, leave us “a blighted earth to
till / With a broken hoe.”
Away from the world, at Steepletop, Millay’s herbs and flowers could still
gladden her, despite rains and untimely frost. Wanting a further retreat, she
and Boissevain bought Ragged Island, eighty rocky acres with a fisherman’s
shack and no electricity, approachable only at high tide, four miles offshore
in Casco Bay, Maine. “Ragged Island, where we shall be entirely alone,” she
wrote a friend, “to gather driftwood, and haul our lobster-traps, and make fish-
chowder, and sail, and read, and sit on the rocks.” A visitor in 1945 watched
Edna waving her arms as she came down the path to the dock, three seagulls
circling round her head. At fifty-three and not at all robust, here “She was
glowing with health and spirits; her red hair was blown free and her green eyes
were shining.”
Later when they went swimming, she let them know what the environment
itself required. “We think bathing dress of any sort is indecent, and so do the
waves and so do the sea gulls and so does the wind.” She was in her element,
floating for hours on end. “There, there where those black spruces crowd / To
the edge of the precipitous cliff,” runs her 1946 poem “Ragged Island.” “There,
thought unbraids itself, and the mind becomes single”—“you only look; you
scarcely feel,” and she incants the utopian adverb, “Oh, to be there.”
World War II had fired Millay’s sense of injustice, already honed by love and
mortality. When the Nazis destroyed a Czech village, she wrote a thirty-two-
page rhymed narrative, The Murder of Lidice, heard on radio all over America.
But she was taking morphine hourly, and though Ragged Island helped her
recover for a while, not much hope remained. Eugen died in 1949, and late one
night the next year, Edna alone at home fell down the stairs and broke her neck.
Along the woodland path to their gravestones at Steepletop, poems of the
place are now set on cedar posts, including her “Counting-out Rhyme” (as in
eeny, meeny, miny, moe). What ’s the environmental news here? Only finding
supple rhythms and rhymes tilting like leaves in her nearby trees, in the names
of nearby trees. (plate 13)