Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

All Poems Original Poems Translations

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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.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I, Being Born A Woman And Distressed

I, being born a woman and distressed

By all the needs and notions of my kind,

Am urged by your propinquity to find

Your person fair, and feel a certain zest

To bear your body's weight upon my breast:

So subtly is the fume of life designed,

To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,

And leave me once again undone, possessed.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Time Does Not Bring Relief

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied

Who told me time would ease me of my pain!

I miss him in the weeping of the rain;

I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

The old snows melt from every mountain-side,

And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;

But last year's bitter loving must remain

Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Recuerdo

We were very tired, we were very merry —

We had gone back and forth all night upon 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 the 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;

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Renascence

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;

Edna St. Vincent Millay

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends —

It gives a lovely light!

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Second Fig

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:

Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

Composition date is unknown - the above date represents the first publication date.The lyrical form of this poem is aa.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Apostrophe To Man

(On reflecting that the world

is ready to go to war again)

Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out.

Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build

bombing airplanes;

Make speeches, unveil statues, issue bonds, parade;

Convert again into explosives the bewildered ammonia

and the distracted cellulose;

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I Know I Am But Summer To Your Heart

I know I am but summer to your heart,

And not the full four seasons of the year;

And you must welcome from another part

Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear.

No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell

Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing;

And I have loved you all too long and well

To carry still the high sweet breast of Spring.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

To A Friend Estranged From Me

Now goes under, and I watch it go under, the sun

That will not rise again.

Today has seen the setting, in your eyes cold and senseless as the sea,

Of friendship better than bread, and of bright charity

That lifts a man a little above the beasts that run.

That this could be!

That I should live to see

Most vulgar Pride, that stale obstreperous clown,

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Counting-Out Rhyme

Silver bark of beech, and sallow

Bark of yellow birch and yellow

Twig of willow.

Stripe of green in moosewood maple,

Colour seen in leaf of apple,

Bark of popple.

Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,

Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,

Edna St. Vincent Millay

If I Should Learn, In Some Quite Casual Way

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,

That you were gone, not to return again—

Read from the back-page of a paper, say,

Held by a neighbor in a subway train,

How at the corner of this avenue

And such a street (so are the papers filled)

A hurrying man—who happened to be you—

At noon to-day had happened to be killed,

Edna St. Vincent Millay