In love with Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna Millay wrote the finest sonnets of any American poet. (I would have said “any poet” without the qualifier “American” but there is this English guy named Shakespeare whose sonnets are pretty good.) In her lifetime people swooned not only over Millay’s poetry (she sold out the Hollywood Bowl for three consecutive nights), but they swooned over her. Men and women fell in love with her regularly, and she fell in love with them regularly. She had many lovers, she broke many hearts, and her heart was broken just as often. She died in 1950, but people still fall in love with her.
I have.
In Love with Edna Millay
Who has ever fallen in love with Sappho?
Not a fling for fragments on papyrus
nor for her fragrant rose-fingered moon
painted in words on potsherd, but desirous
of the woman in violet robes drawn tightly
at the ankle, myrtle flowers, pine
scent, her lyre thrummed at dusk so lightly,
nimble once, her fingers soon stained with wine.
Could only a mad wife love W. Stevens?
How can one fall for the northeast flinty Frost?
Not for their lines of fanciful thought or reasons
captured in rhyme or syllabically crossed,
but for the cut of the jib, shock of hair,
noble mien, or oddness in angle of brow:
such mortal badges, once without compare
to gazing eyes, are just dust in air now.
But, to fall cross a century into a swoon
for a young red-haired Edna St Vincent Millay
is to fall in love with a cool, liquid moon
in the endless heat of a deathless day.
Falling in love with the poet direct,
her savage eye and cool heart’s affair,
is to behold a ghost in beauty bedecked
spiraling down stairs no longer there.
Sappho appears in the first two stanzas because Millay has been called the 20th century Sappho. What remains of Sappho’s intensely lyrical, erotic, personal, romantic poetry is literally in pieces, in ancient bits. Yet she remains a guiding light for lyric and, in particular, feminist poets. Millay had a bust of Sappho in her gardens at Steepletop in upstate New York.
The next two stanzas raise the spectres of Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost, looking past their poetry personas to their actual human presence. As a biographical matter, they loved and were loved, or so it seems. Whatever it was that caused their spouses to fall in love with them, it is dust now.
The final stanzas are about falling in love with Millay, not just with her poetry but with her stories, her photos, her life, or what one imagines about her, long after she’s gone.
At the poem’s end, a ghost spirals down the stairs. Millay died alone in her home in 1950, her beloved husband having died the year before, when, wine glass in hand, she fell down the stairs in her house at Steepletop in upstate New York.