HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY - 2-22-1892 - 10-19-1950

Photo: Carl Van Vecten

Edna Millay was the first poet with whom I fell in love. I discovered her at 19 when I bought a paperback of her poems, and I would lay on my cot with its brown wool blanket, in a barracks in Germany, and read her lyrics and sonnets over and over, memorizing several of them.  I had not been a good student during 12 years of schooling in Mentone, Indiana, but Edna Millay turned out to be an excellent teacher.  Through paying attention to her, I began to notice her precise punctuation; she was like Dylan's Louise who makes it all "too concise and too clear," and I picked it up easily.  My love for Millay has been constant for all these close-to-sixty years.

i couldn't pick a favorite sonnet, but if I could it might be XLVII from Fatal Interview:

Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;

In my own way, and with my full consent.

Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely

Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.

Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping

I will confess; but that's permitted me;

Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping

Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.

If I had loved you less or played you slyly

I might have held you for a summer more,

But at the cost of words I value highly,

And no such summer as the one before.

Should I outlive this anguish -- and men do --

I shall have only good to say of you.

Photo: Walter Skold

Millay's eventual and last home was a large farm near Austerlitz, New York, just across the Massachusetts border, and southeast of Albany -- a 3-1/2 hour drive from my home; Millay named her home Steepletop.  I have visited it three times; once by myself, once with my brother Bernard, and once with my friend Ellen Farnum.  Thousands of books line many shelves, arranged just as Millay left them; I always want to stay and look at each one, but touching, of course, is not allowed.  Her simple gravestone is in the woods on the property.  My friend, Walter Skold, founder of Dead Poet Remembrance Day, decorated it with autumn foliage for his picture above.  The picture of Steepletop, below, I swiped from Google Images.