#edna millay

[sonimage1965]

Edna St. Vincent Millay

[malojasnake]

— Song, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

[unpenny]

Io non ti do il mio amore come fanno le altre ragazze, in uno scrigno freddo d’argento e perle, né ricco di gemme rosse e turchesi, chiuso, senza chiave; né in un nodo, e nemmeno in un anello lavorato alla moda, con la scritta ‘semper fidelis’, dove si nasconde un’ insidia che ottenebra il cervello.

L’ amore a mano aperta, questo solo, senza diademi, chiaro, inoffensivo: come se ti portassi in un cappello primule smosse, o mele nella gonna, e ti chiamassi al modo dei bambini: “Guarda che cos’ho qui! – Tutto per te”

Edna Millay, L’amore a mano aperta

[poetry-and-prose]

“I Think I Should Have Loved You Presently”

I think I should have loved you presently, And given in earnest words I flung in jest; And lifted honest eyes for you to see, And caught your hand against my cheek and breast; And all my pretty follies flung aside That won you to me, and beneath your gaze, Naked of reticence and shorn of pride, Spread like a chart my little wicked ways. I, that had been to you, had you remained, But one more waking from a recurrent dream, Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained, And walk your memory’s halls, austere, supreme, A ghost in marble of a girl you knew Who would have loved you in a day or two.

— Edna St. Vincent Millary (1892-1950)

[the-poetasters-pen]

Interim

"(...) —What do I say? God! God!—God pity me!  Am I gone mad That I should spit upon a rosary? Am I become so shrunken?  Would to God I too might feel that frenzied faith whose touch Makes temporal the most enduring grief; Though it must walk a while, as is its wont, With wild lamenting!  Would I too might weep Where weeps the world and hangs its piteous wreaths For its new dead!  Not Truth, but Faith, it is That keeps the world alive.  If all at once Faith were to slacken,—that unconscious faith Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone Of all believing,—birds now flying fearless Across would drop in terror to the earth; Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins Would tangle in the frantic hands of God And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction! (...)" — Edna St. Vincent Millay

[literature-students-bookshelf]

Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnet "What my Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why." Millay was the first female poet to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923!

[ghuroub]

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 And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution's power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would.

Love is Not All (Sonnet XXX), Edna st. Vincent Millay

[moonshadowsinthemoonwormlight]

–It seemed incredible you were not in the room with me, you were so much nearer than anything else, nearer than the dress I was wearing.–It doesn’t matter at all that we never see each other, & that we write so seldom. We shall never escape from each other.

Edna Millay to Arthur Ficke, from Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay