Poetry of Elation

Hmmm, thanks Raggedyaggie. You could always put it in the Poetry of Sadness thread. Lord knows, there are plenty of sad poems in Millay's work.

Piffka, I think you would find "Savage Beauty" irresistible. Milford spent close to 30 years gathering material for the book, with the permission and assistance of Edna's sister, Norma. (letters, journals, bills, photos, documents that no one but Millays' family had ever seen. )

I'll check into the sadness thread later.

I think I would too, RaggedyA, and I've had it in my hands... only to misplace it. Dang, I hate to buy a book twice. I keep hoping it will turn up.

With gracious Drom's permission, here is a brief summary that might offer some insight as to the circumstances of Millay's death.

Millay and her husband kept a record of the drugs they took - morphine, nembutal, Benzedrine, codeine, insulin, and - gin every day. Millay wrote: "it is too much, but not considering how many kinds of pain I have." Prior to her hospitalization in 1944 for nervous exhaustion and neuritis, she had been treated on and off for approximately 10 years with ovarian extract, -- and with morphine and other sedatives for 8 years as a result of a shoulder injury she incurred in an auto accident. In 1946 she was admitted to the hospital again - for "recurrent depression".On Sept. 11, 1949 less than two weeks after her husband died, she entered the hospital for the third time - diagnosis acute neurasthenia, aggravated by nutritional deficiency and Cirrhosis of the liver. After a week's stay, and a total lack of cooperation with the nurses, she convinced a friend she was well enough to be released. (her physician felt it was not his decision to make) At home, she began to write again. She promised a Thanksgiving poem to The Saturday Evening Post. The first lines read:

Hard, hard it is, this anxious autumm.
To lift the heavy mind from its dark foreboding.

She told a friend it was so wonderful to be writing again.

The close of the poem read:

the trained hand does not forget its skill..
Strength we have, and courage; an acetylene will.

On Oct. 18, 1950 she wired Scribners that she was prepared to give them a quote for the jacket of Ralph Humphries' translation of the Aenead. The next morning, the man she hired to do her chores, found her face down at the landing of her stairs. He immediately called the doctor. Her neck was broken. Her head was resting on some magazines and letters on the landing, where there was a mark of blood and one notebook with the penciled draft of a poem. She had traced a ring around the last three lines:

I will control myself, or go inside.
I will not flaw perfection with my grief.
Handsome, this day: no matter who has died.

(Her husband had been dead exactly one year, one month)

Wow, Raggedy, what life, what death. As you know, I set up threads so that they can develop, no matter what the development might be. Millay is nearly unheard of, in Europe. I think that I like this poem above everything else that she penned:

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,
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 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.

I love that poem, Drom.

Thomas Hardy once said that America had two great attractions, the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

She was probably the most famous poet of the Jazz Age and the embodiment of the New Woman.

Wow Drom , that poem brought tears to my eyes. She is so easy to fall into...

I agree, you two. She was very versatile. It is a shame that she had the pain that she talked of...

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a daïs of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

Always for the First Time
Andre Breton

Always for the first time
Hardly do I know you by sight
You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
A wholly imaginary house
It is there that from one second to the next
In the inviolate darkness
I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring
The one and only rift
In the facade and in my heart
The closer I come to you
In reality
The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room
Where you appear alone before me
At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness
The elusive angle of a curtain
It's a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity of Grasse
With the diagonal slant of its girls picking
Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare
Before them a T-square of dazzling light
The curtain invisibly raised
In a frenzy all the flowers swarm back in
It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep
You as though you could be
The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you
You pretend not to know I am watching you
Marvelously I am no longer sure you know
You idleness brings tears to my eyes
A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures
It's a honeydew hunt
There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the forest
There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings
Flaring out in the center of a great white clover
There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy
There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion
My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time

A Bowl of Cherries
---Dennis O'Driscoll


I

While, granted, life may not be
a bowl of cherries on the whole,
Osias Beert gave literal expression
to the more upbeat view in his
sixteen hundred and something
painting, Still Life with Cherries.
Its glow -- a wood-burning stove --
caught my eye in Stockholm
one harbour-stiffening winter.
Long-spired churches sniffed
the icy air; berries were served
on branches like arctic cherries.
Silhouetted pine trees shivered;
their saw-toothed outlines
chattered in raw snow.


II

Although the season of cherries
is brief, the painter set aside
his griefs to let joy have its way,
each puff-cheeked fruit in its first
flush of youth, a trumpet-blowing
cherub; the roe of some exotic
species plucked from juice, not brine;
the rods and cones of the sun's eye.
The painter's plate is full now
and he is satisfied with his lot
even if the rot will set in soon
and the freshness is pure deception
lasting no longer than cherry blossoms
tossed on snow when north winds
are enjoying their final fling.


III

There are times, his painting
seems to say -- and this is one
of them -- when, despite all
evidence to the contrary, life is
(and no denying it) a bowl of cherries.
Just look at this picture: so rich a crop
that some have dropped off the edge
like coins spilt from a collection plate.
And, although Osias may be far off
the mark where truth (whatever
about beauty) is concerned,
the cherries -- bite-size apples --
tempt with their own improbable
knowledge and the cold viewer's
eyes helplessly assent.

Wow. It is a good thing they had morphine to knock them out. I wonder... surely they could not have taken all of those every day or together. Maybe the gin, every day? and the rest, as needed, for pain, sleep, coughing, diabetes?, etc.

This is very interesting to me, RaggedyAggie. Thanks for your scholarship and to Drom, for her exquisite online courtesy. THX




Millay sometimes used words like acetylene and (I know there are more but can't think of any) which were too modern for my taste. In the same way, the use of T-Square in the Breton poem, is also jarring, though I like the rest of it very much.

Piffka: The chart in the book doesn't list the medications - just the amounts that she took. I do hope you find that book, because once you start reading it, you won't put it down.

And now, perhaps someone here can help me. These lines are running through my mind: "I cannot dream things lovelier than the first dream I had of you." I found the poem once upon a time ago, and now I've lost it again.

Wonderful, Cav. I like your poem, Raggedy. I have ordered Savage Beauty to read for when I get to Armenia...

As for the poem, I have tried searching for all its possible combinations, but can find nothing .

Thanks Drom. I'll do some more searching in my poetry books. It is now driving me crazy. (lol)

One of my favourite yeats

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I WENT out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Here is a horse one by Judith Wright, a well known Australian poet:

Blue Arab

The small blue Arab stallion dances on the hill
like a glancing breaker, like a storm rearing in the sky,
In his prick-ears,the wind, that wanderer and spy,
sings of the dunes of Arabia, lion-coloured still.

The small blue stallion poses like a centaur-god,
netting the sun in his sea-spray mane, forgetting
his stalwart mares for a phantom galloping unshod;
changing for a heat-mirage his tall and velvet hill.

Hey, Deb; thanks for posting here . The Song of Wandering Aengus is one of my favourite Yeats poems, too, although my favourite has to be 'When you are old.' I have never heard of Judith Wright before; are you a big fan of hers? Is there any particular works that you would recommend?

(Good luck with searching, Raggedy. I've been trying to, too, as once someone asks, I need to find it, or else it pesters me badly.)

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -
And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
wreaths of breath -
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.
'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.