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160 pages, Paperback
First published November 28, 1991
Sorrow
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.
People dress and go to town;
I sit in my chair.
All my thoughts are slow and brown:
Standing up or sitting down
Little matters, or what gown
Or what shoes I wear.
THE FIRST rose on my rose-treeWe hear recurrent in Ms. Millay's poetry this seeming ambivalence towards loss and grief, this acceptance that the best things of yesterday have already depreciated immeasurably in time. She knows that we don't appreciate beauty when it is present, beauty "buds, blooms" when "nothing matters" - when we can't appreciate it, when it is too close, when we take it for granted, when we are still aspiring for better. And it shatters before we even see that we were happy. We are much better at grief than gratitude. So much beauty goes unseen by us because we do not give it attention, we do not think of our happiness; but we are wallowers in grief. Grief seems to us an ocean; happiness, beauty, a lightning-flash. We are comforted by the endless vastness of the oceans of grief, their expected tempos and waves of emotion, which threaten imminently to topple us over, to wreck us. We see the flashes of beauty only peripherally, we never seem to catch them head-on, we are never ready with our cameras, and even when we do they never seem quite right captured. We look back on moments of great beauty, and think they "must have been very pretty" - but we did not think so when we had them, when our rose bushes were blooming just outside our windows, on days we kept the windows shut so that bees wouldn't come in, or the wind wouldn't disrupt the pages on our desks. Yes, they must've been very pretty.
Budded, bloomed, and shattered,
During sad days when to me
Nothing mattered.
Grief of grief has drained me clean;
Still it seems a pity
No one saw,—it must have been
Very pretty.
Thus when I swear, "I love with all my heart,"While this is a lovely collection, to anyone interested in Millay's poetry, I would rather recommend her Collected Poems, as they include a broader selection of her poetry, and more specifically consolidate all (or at least most of) Millay's sonnets, which are her strongest and most poignant.
'Tis with the heart of Lilith that I swear,
'Tis with the love of Lesbia and Lucrece;
And thus as well my love must lose some part
Of what it is, had Helen been less fair,
Or perished young, or stayed at home in Greece.
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.OK, fine. Obviously I had already read that one.
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
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! 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.
I am too long away from water.It was what I felt. This is one of the things I look for in poetry -- words that express what I feel.
I have a need of water near.