Edna St. Vincent Millay

An Ancient Gesture
I thought as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron;
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years.
Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.

And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture, - a gesture which implied

To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.

He learned it from Penelope...

Penelope, who really cried.

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 - October 19, 1950) was an American, lyrical poet. And a personal favorite of mine. And when I say favorite I mean it. I only obsess over two poets and they are her and T. S. Eliot. I find her work exceptional and incredibly moving. I mean, the flow and prose is simply wonderful.

She was born in Rockland, Maine and her mother was a nurse while her father was a school teacher. Where her name is derived from is intersting; apparently her middle name - St. Vincent - comes from the name of a hospital where her uncle's life was saved just days prior to her birth. Later she insisted on being called "Vincent", she thought it plain.

Her parents divorced in 1904 which resulted in her, her mother and her sisters (Norma and Kathleen) moving from town to town. And despite being poor and in nearly constant motion her mother was never without her truck on literature that she often read to her children, this collection included William Shakespear and John Milton. Eventually Millay and her family settled in Camden, Maine.

Here is where she wrote her first poem.

Her literary career really began in 1912 whe she netered her poem Renascence (I'd post it if it weren't 214 lines long) into a poetry contest in a magazine called The Lyric Year. This actually ruffled up quite a controversy. It was widely recieved as the best submission but it was ultimately placed 4th in the contest. Even the first place winner (Orrick Johns - who I encourage you to also read up on) felt Millay should have won. Almost immediatley following this strange ordeal for Millay her poem was recited at some sort of banquet that so impressed a wealthy woman; Caroline B. Dow, that she paid for Millay's college education at Vassar.

In 1923 she won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and was the first woman to be honored for this. This is when she gained a lot of popularity in America, though her reputation was soon damaged when she wrote poetry in suport of the Allied effort during WW2.

During her time in college she was a bit...promiscuous. This was with both men and women, and this influenced a great deal of her poetry. But in 1923 she married Eugen Jan Boissevan, though their marriage was an open one with both taking many lovers. One of her lovers was a fellow poet George Dillon, she wrote several of her sonnets about him. Such as -

Sonnet II: Time does not bring relief

Time does not bring relief, you all have lied

Who told me time would ease 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.

There are a hundred places where I fear

To go - so with his memory they brim.

And entering with relief some quiet place

Where never fell his foot or shone his face

I say, "There is no memory of him here!"

And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

Her husband died of lung cancer in 1949, and then she was found dead at the bottom of her stairs in October, 1950. The cause of the fall was unknown. Her work is still widley celebrated and she is considered on of America's greatest female poets.

Her most famous poem is First Fig from A Few Figs From Thistles.

An intersting bit is that mathematicians recognize her sonnet Euclid Alone has Beauty Bare as an expression of mathematical beauty.

To me her work respresents something quite beautiful. Every time I read An Ancient Gesture I feel an acheing in my chest. I tend to overlook her somewhat risque love life as it influened some of the most beautiful poems I have ever read. I feel as though her words twinge and tug at my heartstrings. They both agonize and writhe with lust, love, and a dull, throbbing heartache. I am often at a loss for words when I try to discuss her work.

Its just so wonderful.