millay

Cheryl is doing Poetry Month on her blog, and though I am nowhere NEAR as versed in poetry as she (yeah, I'm the Gtown English major, that's me), there is one poet whose collected works I read as though I were reading an novel. This poet unwittingly gave this blog its name, was introduced to me by a friend, and pulls me into her world by my shoulders every time I dare read a page. So, I decided to share one of her poems with you, and am now sitting among 12 different options of favorites, short and long, deep and ephemeral, about love and ferry trips. It's impossible. Maybe it will be Edna St. Vincent Millay week, and I'll share what I consider essential.

Here's the first essential one. It gives my Web site its name:

To Those Without Pity:

Cruel of heart, lay down my song.
Your reading eyes have done me wrong.
Not for you was the pen bitten,
And the mind wrung, and the song written.

Deceptively simple, as David calls her. And the one I'm sort of in geeky love with, because it's about the Staten Island Ferry (they even pulled a quote from it and plastered it along the wall at the new terminal, which I find impossibly cool):

Recuerdo:

We were very tired, we were very merry-
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable-
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry-
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and the pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

Oh what the hell. My favorite of her many sonnets - at least my favorite one about being IN love, as some of hers that are about heartbreak or simple lust are pretty damn amazing too:

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."

The use of "Ungemmed" in that poem kills me every time.

Yeah, that was three. Sorry.