Start Small

         In the past I’ve had a problem when I bought a poet’s whole work—the 900+ pages of W. H. Auden’s Collected Poems, for example. These tomes would be so daunting, that instead of reading more widely in the poets, I ended up putting the books on the shelf and never delving into them. So, I devised a strategy: when I thought of a poet that I’d like to read more of, I limited myself to their first book of published poems. I tried it out and recently have gone through first collections for Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, and Gwendolyn Brooks. I’ll be posting about all of these soon, I hope, but let me start with Millay.

            Millay’s first book of poems, Renascence (1917), is on the list of Books of the Century, compiled by the New York Public Library, in an exhibition and book to which more than sixty NYPL librarians contributed. The title poem was published first in 1912, but this book gave it a wider circulation.

            I find it difficult to imagine what exactly her contemporaries found so appealing in the title poem, beyond the opening panoramic landscape that the speaker finds constricting.

All I could see from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood;

I turned and looked another way,

And saw three islands in a bay.

So with my eyes I traced the line

Of the horizon, thin and fine,

Straight around till I was come

Back to where I’d started from;

And all I saw from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood.

These couplets, with their repetition of the first couplet at the end and insistence on three features, as well as the straightforward and reductive description, show a stylistic selection and simplicity that is an enduring feature of Millay’s poetry, an authoritative voice that is not going to be apologetic for its formal rigor. It reminds me of Edward Hopper’s paintings.

In the rest of the poem’s 200 lines, the constriction leads her (I use the feminine pronoun for the speaker for obvious, but not compelling, reasons where the poem does not determine it) to lie on her back looking at the sky, which at first seems unconstricting, then constricting again. Infinity comes down around her—the Undefined, Immensity—and she has a view into the workings of the universe, which leads to taking on all the wrongs of it, “All suffering mine.” The speaker sinks into the earth, dead but still sentient. When the rain comes and she wishes to be alive again, she is reborn and has a vision of God’s identity. My initial thought about the poem beyond its opening lines was that Blake might have written it had he been an adolescent girl.

She writes more than once about the grief of losing a loved one, about a suicide who is told, in the house of God, when she asks for something to do, a task: “Thou hadst the task, and laidst it by.” “God’s World” is about not being able to get enough of the world, in the spirit of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur” (“To lift the lean of that black bluff”) without the turn to theology at the end. Other poems concern the absence of the dead, shrouds, sorrow, indifference, blight, the waning year.

The book concludes with six sonnets, the first she published and worth attention, since the form would become more and more her choice as her career progressed with 178 examples by the end, including one book entirely composed of sonnets, Fatal Interview (1931). Originality is there from the beginning: “Thou art not lovelier than lilacs, --no” considers beauty like the poison Mithridates ingested in gradually increasing doses until he became inured to it. “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied” lists the ways we can become ambushed by grief by the seasons, by familiar places; but even going someplace the beloved had never been, just articulating that thought brings him back. “Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring” has a similar message about the seasons: “the long year remembers you.” “Not in this chamber only, at my birth” proposes the strange idea that the speaker is “child of all mothers, native of the earth,” and at the end she longs to gather up her household gods from the current hearth to take them elsewhere. “If I should learn, in some quite casual way” gives us a speaker who says to her lover that if she learned of his death this way, she would react with indifference. This lacks explanation, but gestures toward the kind of insouciance we’re going to see in the next book’s sonnets. A titled sonnet, “Bluebeard,” recounts the beloved’s trespass into a room or internal space and the speaker’s unwillingness to forgive this.

I understand that people found a new voice in the title poem, here, but the rest of the collection was so much more appealing to me, and I guessed so much more representative of the poet Millay was becoming, that I had to go on and read her second book of poems, A Few Figs from Thistles (1920). Here Millay often presents a speaker who is much more knowing, even world-weary if not plainly cynical, than the ones we meet in Renascence. “First Fig” may be the most frequently anthologized of her poems, a quatrain whose theme of carpe diem is given a wry twist by the disapproval the speaker gets from living out this motto: “ah, my foes, and oh, my friends.”

My candle burns at both ends;

              It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

   I          It gives a lovely light!

 

“Second Fig” is a single couplet with a similar theme: the fleeting nature of things demands our enjoying them now. Millay goes further, in “Thursday,” to including love in this transience; the inconstancy gets shifted from the lover to love itself. As she wrote in her first book in “Passer Mortuus Est,” “Need we say it was not love, / Just because it perished?”

 

We were very tired, we were very merry,

We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

 

Thus begins each of the three stanzas of the next poem, “Recuerdo,” which shows a more subtle ability to do several things at once. She writes a New York poem about the Staten Island ferry, the morning paper seller on the streets, and the subway. It’s a bright young thing poem about the up-all-nighters, but it’s also about a moment when the idle revelers meet the poor paper seller on the dawn streets and give her, first the apples and pears they’ve bought too many of, and then all the money they have, keeping only their subway fares home. I liked the poem well enough to memorize it, as was suggested by the New York Times when they featured “Recuerdo” in the interactive poetry selection they sometimes run, doing some light analysis and then encouraging readers to memorize a poem, giving them some assistance in doing so.

            “To the Not Impossible Him” addresses the question lovers don’t usually ask—why will only this one person out of the billions in the world make me happy? The speaker says how will I know if this place, this flower, or you as a lover are the best if I don’t travel and check out others? “Macdougal Street” is another snapshot of a moment, as the speaker sees her beloved “lay his hand upon her torn black hair”—a child has tossed a “quaint Italian quip” at him in the street, and he answers with this gesture, which wrecks the composure of the melodramatic speaker. “The Singing-Woman from the Wood’s Edge” asks how she could have turned out to be anything other than what she is— “a harlot and a nun” for example, given her parentage. “She Is Overheard Singing” about how Prue and Joan and Agatha, Mig, and Sue would all dump their gentle, honest, and patient men for a look from the speaker’s false and lying lover.

            “Daphne” speaks to her pursuer, telling him what may be about to happen if he chases her, and she ends, that if “Still it is your will to follow, / I am off; --to heel, Apollo!” “Portrait by a Neighbor” is about what you would expect from the nosy, disapproving, and probably jealous woman next door. “Midnight Oil” reprises the carpe diem theme of the first poem in the book. “The Merry Maid” insists with unsubtle irony that she’s “free from care” since her heart was broken. “The Philosopher” asks “what are you” of her beloved, that she should pine for him, and answers what is she to defy the truisms about the “witless ways” of women in love.

 

The first edition contained four sonnets, to which one was added later. “I do but ask that you be always fair” suggests the speaker’s love depends on that condition. “Love, though for this you riddle me with darts” taunts Cupid, deliberately insulting him in the hope this blasphemy will cause the god to punish her “with the shaft I crave.” This and “Daphne” are the only classical references in the book, both significantly linking gods and love—or perhaps in the latter case, just lust.

            “I think I should have loved you presently,” says the speaker to the man who left before that could happen. Had that happened, she continues, she would have dropped the behavior she calls her “follies” and “wicked ways” to attract him and been “Naked of reticence and shorn of pride.” She cherishes, she says, “the certain stakes” she gained by not getting to that place. As it is, she imagines how she appears in his memory, not just thinking, as she does, but certain that she “would have loved [him] in a day or two.” This sonnet’s degree of subtlety exceeds what I’ve seen in the previous poems of the first and second books, and it tempers the cynicism.

            “Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!” the speaker cries. She is only faithful to love, but since the beloved is “more changeful than the tide, remaining with him means she is, too, “most faithless when I most am true.” This playing with the contradictory is very like Shakespearean sonnetry, which she must have loved.

            The last poem in the book is the sonnet “I shall forget you presently, my dear,” whose theme is like that of “Thursday:” it would be nice if “love were longer-lived,” but it isn’t, and “Whether or not we find what we are seeking / Is idle, biologically speaking.” Millay is not the fully subtle sonneteer and feminist of her mature poetry here, but she is a long way closer to it than she was in Renascence.

            I’m recommending my method of easy submergence in a poet’s work, with a group of poems that’s manageable for reading and pondering in several days, but also gives you a fair taste of the poet.