A Few Figs from Thistles

With a Biography by Carl Van Doren

Edna St. Vincent Millay

• Publisher: Ragged Hand - Read & Co.
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781528790574
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) was an American playwright, Pulitzer Prize-winning lyrical poet, and feminist activist. One of the most celebrated poets in American history, Millay is hailed as the twentieth century's most skilful sonnet writers who expertly married modern attitudes with traditional forms of expression. First published in 1920, "A Few Figs from Thistles - The Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay" is a collection of Millay's most notable poems, including her famous 'fig' quatrains. Contents: "First Fig", "Second Fig", "Recuerdo", "Thursday", "To the Not Impossible Him", "Macdougal Street", "The Singing-Woman from the Wood's Edge", "She is Overheard Singing", "The Prisoner", "The Unexplorer", "Grown-Up", "The Penitent", etc. A wonderful collection not to be missed by poetry lovers and those who have enjoyed other works by this seminal American poet. Other notable works by this author include: "Two Slatterns and a King" and "The Lamp and the Bell". Ragged Hand - Read & Co is republishing this collection of classic poetry now in a new edition complete with a biography of the author by Carl Van Doren.

EDNA
ST. VINCENT MILLAY

By Carl Van Doren

The little renaissance of poetry which there have been a hundred historians to scent and chronicle in the United States during the last decade, flushed to a dawn in 1912. In that year was founded a magazine for the sole purpose of helping poems into the world; in that year was published an anthology which meant to become annual, though, as it happened, another annual by another editor took its place the year following. The real poetical event of 1912, however, was the appearance in The Lyrical Year, tentative anthology, of the first outstanding poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Who that then had any taste of which he can now be proud but remembers the discovery, among the numerous failures and very innumerous successes which made up the volume, of Renascence, by a girl of twenty whose name none but her friends and a lucky critic or two had heard? After wading through tens and dozens of rhetorical strophes and moral stanzas, it was like suddenly finding wings to come upon these lines:

"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;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood."

The diction was so plain, the arrangement so obvious, that the magic of the opening seemed a mystery; and yet the lift and turn of these verses were magical, as if a lark had taken to the air out of a dreary patch of stubble.

Nor did the poem falter as it went on. If it had the movement of a bird's flight, so had it the ease of a bird's song. The poet of this lucid voice had gone through a radiant experience. She had, she said with mystical directness, felt that she could touch the horizon, and found that she could touch the sky. Then infinity had settled down upon her till she could hear

"The ticking of Eternity."

The universe pressed close and crushed her, oppressing her with omniscience and omnisentience; all sin, all remorse, all suffering, all punishment, all pity poured into her, torturing her. The weight drove her into the cool earth, where she lay buried, but happy, under the falling rain. Suddenly came over her the terrible memory of the "multi-colored, multiform beloved" beauty she had lost by this comfortable death. She burst into a prayer so potent that the responding rain, gathered in a black wave, opened the earth above her and set her free. Whereupon, somewhat quaintly, she moralized her experience with the pride of youth finally arrived at full stature in the world.

Renascence, one of the loveliest American poems, was an adventure, not an allegory, but it sounds almost allegorical because of the way it interpreted and distilled the temper ...

Table of contents

• EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
• FIRST FIG
• SECOND FIG
• RECUERDO
• THURSDAY
• TO THE NOT IMPOSSIBLE HIM
• MACDOUGAL STREET
• THE SINGING-WOMAN FROM THE WOOD'S EDGE
• SHE IS OVERHEARD SINGING
• THE PRISONER
• THE UNEXPLORER
• GROWN-UP
• THE PENITENT
• DAPHNE
• PORTRAIT BY A NEIGHBOR
• MIDNIGHT OIL
• THE MERRY MAID
• TO KATHLEEN
• TO S. M.
• THE PHILOSOPHER
• FOUR SONNETS
• II
• III
• IV