POETRY MONDAY : April 5, 2010
A Tribute to Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Although homage to this great poet would seem fitting at any time, it seems especially fitting for this column to offer it during National Poetry Month. I’m delighted, for strongly personal reasons, to have this opportunity. I remember how I felt as a teenager, sitting in my high-school English classroom and opening a literature anthology to her poem, “Renascence,” the way it spread thrillingly across the page, lifting me up and out of it.
Other women have reported a similar experience with that poem, which catapulted Millay into fame when she was only nineteen years old. She became wildly popular, in a way that few poets are today, went on to publish many poetry collections, plays, and short-stories, and in 1923 was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Dismissed by some critics because of the feminist tone of her work, by others because of what they considered her anti-modernism and sentimentality, and later for her political activism, Millay began to be re-assessed and now is firmly established as a member of the canon. In most anthologies of American poetry, her name is back in the index, with multiple pages listed. She is fully recognized now for her technical virtuosity and dazzling range and is regarded as one of the most important American poets.
In addition to the legacy of her poetry, however, another legacy, less well-known, deserves tribute. For the last twenty-five years of her life she resided at a farmhouse she and her husband, Eugene Boissevain, named “Steepletop,” in Austerlitz, New York, overlooking the Hudson Valley on the West and the Berkshire Hills on the east. On Millay’s death, her sister Norma Millay Ellis, who inherited the estate, set aside a portion of the property as a retreat for artists, the Millay Colony for the Arts, which awards month-long residency fellowships to writers, sculptors, visual artists and composers to pursue their work in solitude. I had the great good fortune to be one of those fellows in April 2003, for which I will be eternally grateful. It was where I completed my second poetry collection, At the Fortune Café.
A separate entity keeping Millay’s reputation alive and benefiting the public is the Edna St.Vincent Millay Society, which has been working for years to preserve the house and grounds as a Historic House and Garden Museum. In 2003 a Millay Poetry Trail was opened on the grounds. For the past three years the Society has been offering yearly exhibitions in the former Ellis Studio across the road from the farmhouse, and for the past two years they have also offered guided garden tours. The barn at Steepletop holds the office of the Executive Director of the Millay Society, Peter Bergman, as well as space for workshops and meetings. Currently, he and I are leading a poetry workshop there for six promising poets, selected anonymously by outside judges.
This year, for the first time, the farmhouse itself will be open to the public. Tours of Steepletop will include Millay’s private suite on the second floor, which contains her bedroom, workroom and library, much as she left them. Restoration work for the lower floor is still in the planning stage, but visitors will also be able to walk the grounds, which held a pool, patio and bar where many parties were held when Millay and her husband were in residence.
Reservations for the house tour ($15), should be made in advance: www.millay.org or 518-392-3362, Tours are planned for Fridays through Mondays, from May 28 through October 18. Guided garden tours ($12) will be available Fridays through Tuesdays. The current exhibit, “Where She Lived,” will be open Thursdays through Tuesdays ($8).
For those of you who are familiar only with her oft-quoted, “My candle burns at both ends ….” and her short lyrics, here is a brief section of her long narrative poem, “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree”(1923).
XIV
She had a horror he would die at night,
And sometimes when the light began to fade
She could not keep from noticing how white
The birches looked — and then she would be afraid,
Even with a lamp, to go about the house
And lock the windows; and as night wore on
Toward morning, if a dog howled, or a mouse
Squeaked on the floor, long after it was gone
Her flesh would sit awry on her. By day
She would forget somewhat, and it would seem
A silly thing to go with just this dream
And get a neighbor to come at night and stay.
But it would strike her sometimes, making the tea:
She had kept that kettle boiling all night long, for company.
XV
There was upon the sill a pencil mark,
Vital with shadow when the sun stood still
At noon, but now, because the day was dark,
It was a pencil mark upon the sill.
And the mute clock, maintaining ever the same
Dead moment, blank and vacant of itself,
Was a pink shepherdess, a picture frame,
A shell marked Souvenir, there on the shelf.
Whence it occurred to her that he might be,
The mainspring being broken in his mind,
A clock himself, if one were so inclined
That stood at twenty minutes after three –
The reason being for this, it might be said,
That things in death were neither clocks nor people,
but only dead.
(used by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor)
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor