Pity me not because the light of day
At close of day no longer walks the sky;
Pity me not for beauties passed away
From field and thicket as the year goes by;
Pity me not the waning of the moon,
Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,
Nor that a man's desire is hushed so soon,
And you no longer look with love on me.

This I have known always: Love is no more
Than the wide blossom the the wind assails,
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales.

Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.

Published around 1929 - Still looking this up

Just a beautiful poem about love and loss and nature. No real reason, just thought I'd share it today.

Never May The Fruit Be Plucked

Never, never may the fruit be plucked from the bough
And gathered into barrels.
He that would eat of love must eat it where it hangs.
Though the branches bend like reeds,
Though the ripe fruit splash in the grass or wrinkle on the tree,
He that would eat of love may bear away with him
Only what his belly can hold,
Nothing in the apron,
Nothing in the pockets.
Never, never may the fruit be gathered from the bough
And harvested in barrels.
The winter of love is a cellar of empty bins,
In an orchard soft with rot.

(From "Harpweaver" 1923)

I love the metaphor Millay employs throughout this poem. It is a reminder, warning and encouragement. The beauty and joy of love is an experience limited to the time frame it takes place in. There is no going back in time, and we often wish we had loved better and more fully when we look back. Vincent loved many people in her life and lost many of them. Her wisdom here was gained at a price, but the grace with which she conveys her knowledge in this simple poem shows her true talent as a poet.

Love Is Not All (Fatal Interview Sonnet XXX)

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.

(From "Fatal Interview" 1931)

This sonnet is fairly well known, probably because it is so accessible and easy to remember. The verse structure makes it a classic sonnet but the content makes it classic Millay. The first part of the poem is often said to be the objective part while the second half is the introspective portion, but knowing what we know about this set of poetry and how it was written largely about her affair with Dillon, it is easy to see that the entire poem is very personal.

The first line is an excellent hook, it pulls the reader in with a general statement of truth. She draws pictures of how love cannot save the lives of people who are ill but reminds us that without love we can suffer greatly as well. Then she uses herself as an example of this fact and asks if there is anything that could force her to give away the feeling of the love they share, or the memory of this night together. She concludes, in her humanizing way, that it is possible. But not likely.

Millay knew how precious love was, and in this little sonnet, with its quaint rhymes and imagery, she reminds us to cherish our loves as well.

How innocent we lie among

How innocent we lie among
The righteous!--Lord, how sweet we smell,
Doing this wicked thing, this love,
Bought up by bishops!--doing well,
With all our leisure, all our pride,
What's illy done and done in haste
By licensed folk on every side,
Spitting out fruit before they taste.

(That stalk must thrust a clubby bud,
Push an abortive flower to birth.)

Under the moon and the lit scud
Of the clouds, the cool conniving earth
Pillows my head, where your head lies;

Weep, if you must, into my hair
Tomorrow's trouble: the cold eyes
That know you gone and wonder where.

But tell the bishops with their sons,
Shout to the City Hall how we
Under a thick barrage of guns
Filched their divine commodity.

(From "Mine The Harvest" 1954)

Where to start? The first important thing to note is that this poem is found in "Mine The Harvest," one of Millay's later books. The maturity of the verse structure makes sense for this timing but the subject matter does not. The beauty of this poem, for me, is in its ability to blend social commentary with joyous passion. I love the alliteration she uses with "cool, conniving earth." But my favorite part of this poem is the last part. It has a victorious feel to it, a rebellious, young and free declaration.

Theme and Variations VIII "The Time of Year Ennobles You"

Theme and Variations VIII

The time of year ennobles you.
The death of autumn draws you in.

The death of those delights I drew
From such a cramped and troubled source
Ennobles all, including you,
Involves you as a matter of course.

You are not, you have never been
(Nor did I ever hold you such)
Between you banks, that all but touch -
Fit subject for heroic song...
The busy stream not over-strong.
The flood that any leaf could dam...

Yet more than half of all I am
Lies drowned in shallow water here:
And you assume the time of year.

I do not say my love will last;
Yet Time's perverse, eccentric power
Has bound the hound and stag so fast
That strange companions mount the tower
Where Lockhart's fate with Keats is cast
And Booth with Lincoln shares the hour.

That which quelled me, lives with me,
Accomplice in catastrophe.

From "Huntsman, What Quarry?"

This is one of eight exquisite poems in a series called "Theme and Variation." The set of poems is about the end of a relationship and it has both comforted and inspired me. Even when I am not in a place where I can directly relate to the theme of the poems, the imagery and haunting verse structure always draw me in. Enjoy.

Dirge Without Music

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.
The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

(From "Buck In The Snow" 1928)

I read this poem as part of a poetry presention I did for Speech competitions in high school. I made it to state and through the quarter finals. I didn't enough points to progress past semi-finals and I remember clearly reading in the critiques of my presentation that my reading of this poem - Millay's "Dirge Without Music" was too emotional and dramatic, and thus I didn't get the full amount of points from the judges.

They were right, to a point. Speech competitions are about professional, reserved presentation. But perhaps I made the wrong choice of poem, because how can anyone read something so powerful, defiant and soulful without feeling it resonante throughout their being?

Working at the hospital I meet many inspirational people. But they are not well, and some of them pass away, and it is difficult to accept that these beautiful, strong people are gone.

I know that I've mentioned before that Millay suffered many losses early in her life, and death took many of the people she loved from her. This poem is so uniquely Vincent. It is about death but not about mourning. Perhaps the most tear-jerking line in the poem "More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world", happens near the end, and I feel that the poem does move from reserve to emotionality, with the feeling of the poem peaking at the second to last line. And then she ends the way she began with "I am not resigned."

Rendezvous

Rendezvous

Not for these lovely blooms that prank your chambers did I come. Indeed,
I could have loved you better in the dark;
That is to say, in rooms less bright with roses, rooms more casual, less aware
Of History in the wings about to enter with benevolent air
On ponderous tiptoe, at the cue, "Proceed."
Not that I like the ash-trays over-crowded and the place in a mess,
Or the monastic cubicle too unctuously austere and stark,
But partly that these formal garlands for our Eighth Street Aphrodite are a bit too Greek,
And partly that to make the poor walls rich with our unaided loveliness
Would have been more chic.
Yet here I am, having told you of my quarrel with the taxi-driver over a line of Milton, and you laugh; and you are you, none other.
Your laughter pelts my skin with small delicious blows.
But I am perverse: I wish you had not scrubbed--with pumice, I suppose--
The tobacco stains from your beautiful fingers. And I wish I did not feel like your mother.

(From "Huntsman, What Quarry?" 1939)

This poem was running through my head last night but I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps it is Vincent's declaration that she "could have loved you better in the dark" and her quick correction of herself to show that she merely means that the room is overly decorated. And perhaps it is the simply perfect expression she uses when she says "you are you, none other" and adds a line about laughter that surprises me in its elegance.

In retrospect, perhaps I was trying to work out exactly what Vincent was talking about when she says she was quarreling with a taxi driver "over a line of Milton." I had always thought it was some antiquated expression for money or a place she was trying to go but now I think that Vincent, ever the intellectual as well as the poet, was actually arguing with the driver of her taxi over what the exact phrasing was of a line from one of Milton's poems! Now that would be an interesting story.

And the story of this poem is interesting. She sent it to Dillon with a large collection of other poems but this was the one he published in his magazine, the only one he seemed to like completely. Perhaps it is his odd taste to refuse rhyme in place of casual verse, or perhaps it just seemed the most fitting description of how things really were between the two of them.

Time Sonnet

Time, that renews the tissues of this frame,
That built the child and hardened the soft bone,
Taught him to wail, to blink, to walk alone,
Stare, question, wonder, give the world a name,
Forget the watery darkness from whence he came,
Attends no less the boy to manhood grown,
Brings him new raiment, strips him of his own;
All skins are shed at length, remorse, even shame.
Such hope is mine, if this indeed be true,
I dread no more the first white in my hair,
Or even age itself, the easy shoe,
The cane, the wrinkled hands, the special chair:
Time, doing this to me, may alter too
My anguish, into something I can bear.

(From "Wine From These Grapes" 1934)

This sonnet seems to flow through a lifetime in a minute.

Rosemary

Rosemary

For the sake of some things
That be now no more
I will strew rushes
On my chamber-floor,
I will plant bergamot
At my kitchen-door.
For the sake of dim things
That were once so plain
I will set a barrel
Out to catch the rain,
I will hang an iron pot
On an iron crane.
Many things be dead and gone
That were brave and gay;
For the sake of these things
I will learn to say,
"An it please you, gentle sirs,"
"Alack!" and "Well-a-day!"

(From "Second April" 1921)

The ways we remember people and relationship that were dear to us are not always direct, but personal symbolisms have meanings that can ease the pain of loss.

Exiled

Searching my heart for its true sorrow,
This is the thing I find to be:
That I am weary of words and people,
Sick of the city, wanting the sea;

Wanting the sticky, salty sweetness
Of the strong wind and shattered spray;
Wanting the loud sound and the soft sound
Of the big surf that breaks all day.

Always before about my dooryard,
Marking the reach of the winter sea,
Rooted in sand and dragging drift-wood,
Straggled the purple wild sweet-pea;

Always I climbed the wave at morning,
Shook the sand from my shoes at night,
That now am caught beneath great buildings,
Stricken with noise, confused with light.

If I could hear the green piles groaning
Under the windy wooden piers,
See once again the bobbing barrels,
And the black sticks that fence the weirs,

If I could see the weedy mussels
Crusting the wrecked and rotting hulls,
Hear once again the hungry crying
Overhead, of the wheeling gulls,

Feel once again the shanty straining
Under the turning of the tide,
Fear once again the rising freshet,
Dread the bell in the fog outside,—

I should be happy,—that was happy
All day long on the coast of Maine!
I have a need to hold and handle
Shells and anchors and ships again!

I should be happy, that am happy
Never at all since I came here.
I am too long away from water.
I have a need of water near.


I thought it was time for an ocean poem. Millay grew up on the ocean in northern Maine but she lived most of her adult life travelling and settled in upstate New York with Boissevain. Her description of the sounds, smells and sights of a fishing village are so real and evocative, it makes me feel that I am there with her, and I can almost hear the gulls and smell the salt water. Her declaration the she "has a need to hold and handle/shells and anchors and ships again!" is so decisive it is a call to rush to the beach! I also love the way she begins this poem, trying to found out why she feeling sad and realizing that past all of these daily cares, the true reason for her depression is distance from the ocean. I think that many people can relate to that feeling of being most alive when you are near the ocean, whether it be Pacific, Atlantic or any other!

"I Should Have" Sonnet

I think I should have loved you presently,
And given in earnest words I flung in jest;
And lifted honest eyes for you to see,
And caught your hand against my cheek and breast;
And all my pretty follies flung aside
That won you to me, and beneath your gaze,
Naked of reticence and shorn of pride,
Spread like a chart my little wicked ways.
I, that had been to you, had you remained,
But one more waking from a recurrent dream,
Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,
And walk your memory's halls, austere, supreme,
A ghost in marble of a girl you knew
Who would have loved you in a day or two.


I love the simple statement this poem makes about attractions that don’t turn into romances, and the certainty she has, both about what the future would have been and about the memory that this person has of her. It addresses us as the opportunity lost and tells us what we have missed. And she is describing a real phenomenon, the moment when games and flirtation turn to love and seriousness. My favorite line from this poem is “But one more waking from a recurrent dream” as it calls to mind the way multiple similar days can feel like waking up in the same day over and over again.

Souvenir

Just a rainy day or two
In a windy tower,
That was all I had of you—
Saving half an hour.

Marred by greeting passing groups
In a cinder walk,
Near some naked blackberry hoops
Dim with purple chalk.
I remember three or four
Things you said in spite,
And an ugly coat you wore,
Plaided black and white.

Just a rainy day or two
And a bitter word.
Why do I remember you
As a singing bird?

This poem really speaks about the changeable and emotional nature of memory. Although she remembers this person with vivid detail, her sense of their time together contradicts the specifics of her memory. It reminds me that sometimes moments are etched on our memories not because of what happened, but because of the way we felt.