Welcome to our collection of quotes by Edna St. Vincent Millay. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950) was an American lyrical poet and playwright.
Encouraged to read the classics at home, she was too rebellious to make a success of formal education, but she won poetry prizes from an early age, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, and went on to use verse as a medium for her feminist activism. She also wrote verse-dramas and a highly-praised opera, The King's Henchman. Her novels appeared under the name Nancy Boyd, and she refused lucrative offers to publish them under her own name.
Millay was a prominent social figure of New York City's Greenwich Village just as it was becoming known as a bohemian writer's colony, and she was noted for her uninhibited lifestyle, forming many passing relationships with both men and women. She was also a social and political activist and those relationships included prominent anti-war activists including Floyd Dell, editor of the radical magazine The Masses, and perhaps John Reed. She became a prominent feminist of her time; her poetry and her example, both subversive, inspired a generation of American women.
Her career as a poet was meteoric. In 1923 she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer prize in poetry. She became a performance artist super-star, reading her poetry to rapt audiences across the country. A road accident in middle-age left her a partial invalid and morphine-dependent for years. Yet near the end of her life, she wrote some of her greatest poetry.
Some of us have been thinking and talking too long without doing anything. Poems are perfect; picketing, sometimes, is better.
It is not true that life is one damn thing after another: it's one damn thing over and over.
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night, I miss you like hell.
Let us not forget such words, and all they mean, as hatred, bitterness, and rancor greed, intolerance, bigotry; let us renew our faith and pledge to man, his right to be himself and free.
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night. I miss you like hell.
Little skinny shoulder-blades sticking through your clothes! And where you'll get a jacket from God above knows.
April comes like an idiot, babbling and stewing flowers.
I know I am but summer to your heart, And not the full four seasons of the year.
I'm so tired of hearing about 'Renascence,' I'm nearly dead. I find it's as hard to live down an early triumph as an early indiscretion.
Sorrow like a ceaseless rain
Beats upon my heart.
People twist and scream in pain --
Dawn will find them still again;
This has neither wax nor wane,
Neither stop nor start.
Need we say it was not love,
Now that love is perished?
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts ... they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill.
Longing alone is singer to the lute.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Set the foot down with distrust on the crust of the world -- it is thin.
For the body at best
Is a bundle of aches,
Longing for rest;
It cries when it wakes.
April this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.
Dust in an urn long since, dispersed and dead
Is great Apollo; and the happier he.
The heart grows weary after a little Of what it loved for a little while.
And you as well must die, beloved dust,
And all your beauty stand you in no stead;
This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
This body of flame and steel, before the gust.
Let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
It's not love's going hurts my days
But that it went in little ways.
Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?
Life must go on, Though good men die.
All right,
Go ahead!
What's in a name?
I guess I'll be locked into
As much as I'm locked out of!
All my life, Following Care along the dusty road, Have I looked back on loveliness and sighed.
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.
Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink.
You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It's only that.
When you publish something, it is very much as if you pulled your pants down in public. If what you have written is good, nobody can hurt you; if what you have written is bad, nobody can help you.
And he whose soul is flat -- the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.
Life is a quest and love a quarrel.
I find that I never lose Bach. I don't know why I have always loved him so. Except that he is so pure, so relentless and incorruptible, like a principle of geometry.
I shall forget before the flickers mate
Your look that is today my east and west.
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand. Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
Degraded bird, I give you back your eyes forever, ascend now whither you are tossed;
Forsake this wrist, forsake this rhyme;
Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost,
But climb.
Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost, but climb.
A Poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay: Grown-up Was it for this I uttered prayers, And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs, That now, domestic as a plate, I should retire at half-past eight?
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying!
This I do, being mad:
Gather baubles about me,
Sit in a circle of toys, and all the time
Death beating the door in.
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn what the swift mind beholds at every turn.
On and on eternally
Shall your altered fluid run,
Bud and bloom and go to seed;
But your singing days are done.
And her voice is a string of colored beads, Or steps leading into the sea.
Beauty never slumbers; All is in her name; But the rose remembers The dust from which it came.
That which has quelled me, lives with me, Accomplice in catastrophe.
How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers The buck in the snow ... Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.
Father, I beg of Thee a little task To dignify my days, 'tis all I ask.
I am not at all in favor of hard work for its own sake; many people who work very hard indeed produce terrible things, and should most certainly not be encouraged.
For the body at best
Is a bundle of aches,
Longing for rest;
It cries when it wakes.
Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
Night falls fast. Today is in the past. Blown from the dark hill hither to my door Three flakes, then four Arrive, then many more.
Beautiful as a dandelion-blossom, golden in the green grass, This life can be. Common as a dandelion-blossom, beautiful in the clean grass, not beautiful Because common, beautiful because beautiful, Noble because common, because free.
It may be said of me by Harper and Brothers, that although I reject their proposals, I welcome their advances.
I hate people but I love gatherings.
I love humanity but I hate people.
I make bean stalks, I'm A builder, like yourself.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before.
Ah, I could lay me down in this long grass And close my eyes, and let the quiet wind Blow over me.
To a Young Poet Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird. Bird and wing together Go down, one feather. No thing that ever flew, Not the lark, not you, Can die as others do.
I know what my heart is like Since your love died: It is like a hollow ledge Holding a little pool Left there by the tide, A little tepid pool, Drying inward from the edge.
Death devours all lovely things;
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness -- presently
Every bed is narrow.
Death devours all lovely things.
Life isn't one thing after another, it's the same thing over and over.
It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over.
Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare, And left the flushed print in a poppy there. I will touch a hundred flowers And not pick one.
Lost in Hell,-Persephone,
Take her head upon your knee;
Say to her, My dear, my dear,
It is not so dreadful here.
I, being born a woman and distressed By all the needs and notions of my kind.
A grave is such a quiet place.
And reaching up my hand to try, I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
Euclid alone Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.
Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare.
When you are corn and roses and at rest I shall endure, a dense and sanguine ghost To haunt the scene where I was happiest To bend above the thing I loved the most.
Strange how few, After alls said and done, the things that are Of moment.
So up I got in anger, And took a book I had, And put a ribbon on my hair To please a passing lad. And, One thing there's no getting by -- I've been a wicked girl, said I; But if I can't be sorry, why, I might as well be glad!
Life isn't all beer and skittles; few of us have touched a skittle in years.
Cut if you will with sleep's dull knife, the years from off your life, my friend! the years that death takes off my life, he'll take from off the other end!
Oh, children, growing up to be Adventurers into sophistry, Forbear, forbear to be of those That read the rood to learn the rose.
When I can make Of ten small words a rope to hang the world! I had you and I have you now no more.
The world stands out on either side, No wider than the heart is wide.
There is no God. But it does not matter. Man is enough.
The Englishman foxtrots as he fox-hunts, with all his being, through thickets, through ditches, over hedges, through chiffons, through waiters, over saxophones, to the victorious finish; and who goes home depends on how many the ambulance will accommodate.
I saw and heard, and knew at last The How and Why of all things, past, and present, and forevermore.
Without music I should wish to die.
It is high time we found out about this man Cummings. Let us give him every opportunity to show us at once whether he is a genius, a charlatan, or a congenital defective -- and get him off our minds.
Earth does not understand her child,
Who from the loud gregarious town
Returns, depleted and defiled,
To the still woods, to fling him down.
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere.
Martyred many times must be Who would keep his country free.
Life has no friend.
I went to Boston fully expecting to be arrested -- arrested by a polizia created by a government that my ancestors rebelled to establish.
A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.
The fabric of my faithful love
No power shall dim or ravel
Whilst I stay here -- but oh, my dear,
If I should ever travel!
L 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.
I know, but I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
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.
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.