By Ashley Lister
Late last month I was writing
a paper about poetry. It was a general paper and I’ll be delivering it at a
conference in a month’s time. But, whilst I was writing the paper I
inadvertently ended up discovering Edna St Vincent Millay.
Not that she’d been missing
and I found her.
And not that I didn’t know some
of her poetry before. I’d encountered First Fig a few years ago and thought it
was an entertaining piece of writing.
First Fig
By Edna St
Vincent Millay
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.[1]
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light.[1]
But
I didn’t know that Edna St Vincent Millay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. I
didn’t know that she was a poet and a playwright, a feminist and an activist,
and openly bisexual in an era when being open about any type of sexuality was
frowned upon.
Some
commentators suggest that it’s easier to understand First Fig when the reader
is aware of ESVM’s bisexuality. I don’t know whether I subscribe to this belief.
I do know that discovering Edna St Vincent Millay’s writing made that research
immensely more pleasurable than it had been.
Which
is why, my advice for this week’s topic, would always be to take the time to discover
new writers. Whether they’re alive or dead, new or old, proven or untested it’s
worth taking the time to explore how someone unfamiliar puts pen to paper. Sometimes
it might be a disaster. But, more often than not, the discovery can be
incredible.
I Too Beneath
Your Moon, Almighty Sex
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex,
Go forth at nightfall crying like a cat,
Leaving the lofty tower I laboured at
For birds to foul and boys and girls to vex
With tittering chalk; and you, and the long necks
Of neighbours sitting where their mothers sat
Are well aware of shadowy this and that
In me, that’s neither noble nor complex.
Such as I am, however, I have brought
To what it is, this tower; it is my own;
Though it was reared To Beauty, it was wrought
From what I had to build with: honest bone
Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought;
And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.[2]
[1]Edna
St Vincent Millay, (1923) ‘First Fig’ from Ballad
of the Harp Weaver, and other short poems.
[2] I
Too Beneath Your Moon, Almighty Sex, http://risdyeswecan.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/i-too-beneath-your-moon.html
Accessed 27th December 2012