ESVM Love (or not) Poetry

Here's another...

Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!
Faithless am I am save to love's self alone.
Were you not lovely I would leave you now;
After the feet of beauty fly my own.
Were you not still my hunger's rarest food,
And water ever to my wildest thirst,
I would desert you ~ ~ think not but I would! ~ ~
And seek another as I sought you first.
But you are mobile as the veering air,
And all your charms more changeful than the tide,
Wherefore to be inconstant is no care:
I have but to continue at your side.
So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,
I am most faithless when I most am true.

and another...

When we are old and these rejoicing veins
Are frosty channels to a muted stream,
And out of all our burning their remains
No feeblest spark to fire us, even in dream,
This be our solace: that it was not said
When we were young and warm and in our prime,
Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead,
Sleeping away the unreturning time.
O sweet, O heavy-lidded, O my love,
When morning strikes her spear upon the land,
And we must rise and arm us and reprove
The insolent daylight with a steady hand,
Be not discountenanced if the knowing know
We rose from rapture but an hour ago.


Don't you think these are great??

Hi pifka!

They are more than great, they're wonderful.

I had read the first two before, but I think I read then hurriedly
and didn't fully appreciate them.
I know, I know, that's no way to read poetry, but sometimes
when I get a new book I read it like a glutton instead of a gourmet!

I suppose, to get the most from a poem, it's best to be a 'ruminant', like a cow ...to chew on it at length.

A ruminanting, poetry-loving bovine? OK. I like that!

Here's another (this is why I like Edna, she's so in love with life.)

PASSER MORTUUS EST

Death devours all lovely things;
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness,--presently
Every bed is narrow.

Unremembered as old rain
Dries the sheer libation,
And the little petulant hand
Is an annotation.

After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it was not love,
Now that love is perished?

Found another that, IMO fits this category...

Oh, my beloved, have you thought of this:
How in the years to come unscrupulous Time,
More cruel than Death, will tear you from my kiss,
And make you old, and leave me in my prime?
How you and I, who scale together yet
A little while the sweet, immortal height
No pilgrim may remember or forget,
As sure as the world turns, some granite night
Shall lie awake and know the gracious flame
Gone out forever on the mutual stone;
And call to mind that on the day you came
I was a child, and you a hero grown?--
And the night pass, and the strange morning break
Upon our anguish for each other's sake!

Not in a silver casket cool with pearls
Or rich with red corundum or with blue,
Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls
Have given their loves, I give my love to you;
Not in a lovers'-knot, not in a ring
Worked in such fashion, and the legend plain --
Semper fidelis, where a secret spring
Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain:
Love in the open hand, no thing but that,
Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslips in a hat
Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,
I bring you, calling out as children do:
"Look what I have! -- And these are all for you."

Nice Bree, didn't know that one!

How 'bout this...

WITCH-WIFE

She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun 'tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.

piffka bree

I think I recognize most, or at least some, of these poems as by ESVM.

Given the title of the thread I would assume they ALL are hers but I'm not completely sure as you haven't labeled them.

They are all by ESVM right?

PS bree

bienvenido amiga!

This thread is wonderful, piffka. I'll have to get out my book and copy out my favourite for you. (it's about trains and makes me think of you)

Thanks, Bethie. I'm really glad you like it. I don't have ESVM's anthology (maybe for Christmas??). I look forward to seeing this poem you mention... Is it one that ends...

My heart is warm with the friends I make
And better friends I'll not be knowing;
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
No matter where it's going.


To answer your question Jjorge... as far as I'm concerned this is an all ESVM page. I messed up the subject title <big sigh> but that is what I meant to have.

I'm also planning an ESVM page of her acceptance of death poems.
Then there'll probably be another on her love of nature poems. And another of political poems. Then maybe we'll be done! LOL

You're right, jjorge, at least about the poem I posted: it is by Millay.

Do you have any more favorites, Bree?

As I recall, you're more of an Emily Dickinson fan... I like her, too.

I have lots more Millay favorites, Piffka, but I won't be able to post any more until tomorrow. (I'm at work now, so I don't have access to my home library, and I'll be out this evening.) But I'll be back....

All right, Bree. I've hardly met a Millay poem I didn't like!

OK, here's another for all those "panting" to hear more...

SONNET


Women have loved before as I love now;
At least, in lively chronicles of the past -
Of Irish waters by a Cornish prow
Or Trojan waters by a Spartan mast
Much to their cost invaded - here and there,
Hunting the amorous line, skimming the rest,
I find some woman bearing as I bear
Love like a burning city in the breast.
I think however that of all alive
I only in such utter, ancient way
Do suffer love; in me alone survive
The unregenerate passions of a day
When treacherous queens, with death upon the tread,
Heedless and willful, took their knights to bed.


Edna St. Vincent Millay (1930)

Here are two more Millay sonnets, very different from each other:

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It may well be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.



Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!
Give back my book and take my kiss instead.
Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,
"What a big book for such a little head!"
Come, I will show you now my newest hat,
And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!
Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that.
I never again shall tell you what I think.
I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly;
You will not catch me reading any more:
I shall be called a wife to pattern by;
And some day when you knock and push the door,
Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,
I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.

Thanks, Bree. Those are wonderful. I know I've posted that first one on abuzz, I admire it so much. The second has a piquant tone... similar to her seemingly carefree attitude, similar to the attititude of this sonnet:

IV


Only until this cigarette is ended,
A little moment at the end of all,
While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
And in the firelight to a lance extended,
Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
The broken shadow dances on the wall,
I will permit my memory to recall
The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.
And then adieu,--farewell!--the dream is done.
Yours is a face of which I can forget
The color and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set.

Today's ESVM Love Poem...

THE PENITENT

I had a little Sorrow,
Born of a little Sin,
I found a room all damp with gloom
And shut us all within;
And, "Little Sorrow, weep," said I,
"And, Little Sin, pray God to die,
And I upon the floor will lie
And think how bad I've been!"

Alas for pious planning - -
It mattered not a whit!
As far as gloom went in that room,
The lamp might have been lit!
My little Sorrow would not weep,
My little Sin would go to sleep --
To save my soul I could not keep
My graceless mind on it!

So I got up in anger,
And took a book I had,
And put a ribbon on my hair
To please a passing lad,
And, "One thing there's no getting by --
I've been a wicked girl," said I:
"But if I can't be sorry, why,
I might as well be glad!"

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I just love this one, too. (I always want to be taller.)

THE CONCERT

No, I will go alone.
I will come back when it's over.
Yes, of course I love you.
No, it will not be long.
Why may you not come with me?--
You are too much my lover.
You would put yourself
Between me and song.

If I go alone,
Quiet and suavely clothed,
My body will die in its chair,
And over my head a flame,
A mind that is twice my own,
Will mark with icy mirth
The wise advance and retreat
Of armies without a country,
Storming a nameless gate,
Hurling terrible javelins down
From the shouting walls of a singing town

Where no women wait!
Armies clean of love and hate,
Marching lines of pitiless sound
Climbing hills to the sun and hurling
Golden spears to the ground!
Up the lines a silver runner
Bearing a banner whereon is scored
The milk and steel of a bloodless wound
Healed at length by the sword!

You and I have nothing to do with music.
We may not make of music a filigree frame,
Within which you and I,
Tenderly glad we came,
Sit smiling, hand in hand.

Come now, be content.
I will come back to you, I swear I will;
And you will know me still.
I shall be only a little taller
Than when I went.

ESVM