ypsi~dixit

What Edna misses is that there is peace in the empty cup, and beauty in the dirt-stained woodgrain of the uncarpeted stairs.

I think Edna is almost but not quite smart enough to recognize that it's not Spring she objects to. It's really the loss of her own inner Spring she is bitterly lamenting.

That Spring being innocence, and the ability to live in the moment, and the impulse and action of, say, stopping while on a walk and burying one's nose in a lush bed of moss and breathing it in...and being totally transported into bliss in that moment of moss-sniffing.

Edna is, unbeknownst to herself, mourning the fact that she's closed herself off from the banquet of joy that the simplest things in life can be, like the sight of tiny leaves, or clouds, or the light on the water.

You don't fool me, E.

My father died in April ten years ago and I remember waking up every morning so overcome with grief and then walking out into the warm spring sunshine, with birds singing, flowers blooming, and baby squirrels and puppies frolicking everywhere. It seemed like such a strange thing to die in the spring--not at all the correct order of things. I think November or February would be better months for dying. So I understand the author's point, although for me, it was soothing to see that life went on in spite of it all, that April still babbled and strew flowers, despite my personal sorrow.

I am sorry to hear it.

Juliew, thank you for sharing a personal experience.

Edna is, unbeknownst to herself, mourning the fact that she's closed herself off from the banquet of joy that the simplest things in life can be, like the sight of tiny leaves, or clouds, or the light on the water.

I'd buy that. I also think spring gives her an intimation of life without purpose, that she perceives these natural cycles playing themselves out again and again without progressing anywhere. She seems to have the idea that meaning comes not from the world but from what those people's brains, before becoming worm riddled, do with the world. There's a nature/culture conflict here, or a conflict between cyclical and linear notions of time. Which I guess goes with your idea of her being unable to fully inhabit a given moment. She wants to see where something is pointing.

She seems to have the idea that meaning comes not from the world but from what those people's brains, before becoming worm riddled, do with the world.

Oh, interesting.

But what a bleak view of the world. Though it's also a view Zen Buddhism attempts to get beyond, if I'm thinking about it right.

The speaker in the poem is quite fully aware of the "banquet of joy that the simplest things in life can be," but rejects it precisely because she's 'smart enough' to both see that the individual's emotional response to such things is purely a matter of personal taste, and also that spring, being BOTH transitive and cyclical, is an arbitrary point along an infinite timeline of potentially 'meaningful' or 'meaningless' moment, dependant upon the perceptions of the viewer.

Although she certainly comes off as cynical, this is a natural reaction to acceptance of the existential position, and I don't see how her conclusion denotes either a lack of intelligence or, as shupac suggests, any indication that she's striving towards some deeper meaning- this is precisely what she's denying is possible.

Brett*: that is persuasive and thoughtful.

But your argument portrays Millay as a sort of cynical existentialist who can't be suckered into the smallest sentimentality or "arbitrary" emotional response...

and yet, I think of a poem of hers that is breathtakingly emotional:

Ebb

I KNOW what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.

But actually, I think that this particular month, April, had a very personal meaning for Millay. But what? (I don't know). There are some clues in the following poem:

Song of a Second April

APRIL this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.

There rings a hammering all day,
And shingles lie about the doors;
From orchards near and far away
The gray wood-pecker taps and bores,
And men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.

The larger streams run still and deep;
Noisy and swift the small brooks run.
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
Go up the hillside in the sun
Pensively; only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.

So now I wonder which April poem she wrote first, and what the heck the backstory is.

She feels personally saddened, and expresses that in the second poem.

What she is saying in the first, though, is that just because you think something is good or bad, doesn't mean she has to go along with it. She could even change her mind and start to love spring, but isn't going to do so simply because of a popularized sensibility of 'rebirth' that is inherently meaningless, which I think she alludes to in the third poem with the line "The larger streams run still and deep", insinuating there's a bigger picture playing, even as we're distracted by the sounds of much smaller babbling brooks or a few pretty flower buds.

That is also persuasive, Brett*.

So, these lines in the first one are the really problematic ones for me:

"The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots."

Is she saying--these things exist, but do not *signify* anything--other than themselves?

And that the maggots are her way of saying it is corrupted thinking to ascribe the whole load of sentimentality to Spring instead of just taking its aspects at face value?

In the second April poem, I find the line

The larger streams run still and deep;

not only oxymoronic ("run still"?) but ominous. As if she is the larger stream, like her own life is running down, becoming still, deep (in the ground). Stopping. Or being stopped.

Go up the hillside in the sun
Pensively; only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.

The placement of "alone" in the last line is weird and interesting. It really sticks out. She could have put it on the end and have had a triple slant rhyme.

But this is a better placement. If she said,

You that I cared to keep alone.

it sounds as if she wanted to keep her lover in the house and have him or her all to herself. But if she says

You that alone I cared to keep.

it is much richer. Now it means several things: I wanted to live alone with you, away from the world, and also, of all the world's things, you are the only one I wanted to keep; all the rest is meaningless.

I think she's saying that it *appears* that there is no death, but in fact there is plenty just below the surface. And yes, I think that 'corrupted thinking' and sentimentality are principally what she's attacking.

I still think the poem is directed at least as much outward as inward--it's the outward gaze that refutes popular sentimentality.(I also can't see any grounds to say the speaker is interrogating her emotional impulses--she seems quite secure in her feelings in the first poem.) In a nutshell, I think the poems are saying, to paraphrase the title of a favorite book, "the earth is not enough." In the last poem, we see what is needed (or at least one thing needed) to fill the "empty cup" of raw, instinctual life--love. Though the speaker still has the earth in all its beauty, she lacks the beloved who alone made the whole spectacle worthwhile.

"she lacks the beloved who alone made the whole spectacle worthwhile"

The fact that she clearly misses her love is true, but I think she would reject the notion of such an outside force providing meaning in her own life, without her consent. I don't know much about Edna personally, but from these few samples it seems doubtful that she would accept such an idealistic interpretation.

I think it would be interesting to see everyone's reaction to the initial poem, if it had instead been set in wintertime, and argued that although everyone around her regarded the season as cold and death-like, the author saw life "just below the surface", waiting to spring up in april. It would be arguing precisely the same point of perception, but from a different perspective, more palatable to most readers who hope for a 'silver lining' in the message of a poem.

THURSDAY by Edna St. Vincent Millay

And if I loved you Wednesday,
    Well, what is that to you?
I do not love you Thursday– 
    So much is true. 

And why you come complaining

    Is more than I can see.

I loved you Wednesday,–yes–but what 

    Is that to me? 

Ouch. I've been the addressee of that particular stinging little poem. Ow.

I'm gonna counter the message in that poem with the opposite message in another Millay poem, below:

Mariposa

BUTTERFLIES are white and blue
In this field we wander through.
Suffer me to take your hand.
Death comes in a day or two.

All the things we ever knew
Will be ashes in that hour:
Mark the transient butterfly,
How he hangs upon the flower.

Suffer em to take your hand.
Suffer me to cherish you
Till the dawn is in the sky.
Whether I be false or true,
Death comes in a day or two.

I wouldn't say it's an opposite message, as the love described is still 1) transitory, 2) potentially faked, and 3) the result of an individual's free choice. "Thursday" could easily be part of a conversation held between the same two people a few days later.

I think it would be interesting to see everyone's reaction to the initial poem, if it had instead been set in wintertime, and argued that although everyone around her regarded the season as cold and death-like, the author saw life "just below the surface", waiting to spring up in april. It would be arguing precisely the same point of perception, but from a different perspective, more palatable to most readers who hope for a 'silver lining' in the message of a poem.

I think that's a shrewd observation. And I note it's the palatable poems that pablum-like slip through me and are digested away, while it's the jagged ones, like this one, that stick in my craw, poke, and are right there in me, reminding me, when April rolls around.

Though the speaker still has the earth in all its beauty, she lacks the beloved who alone made the whole spectacle worthwhile.

Truer words were never spoken.

Brett*, I see your point. But I do respectfully disagree that it's transitory. She says, death comes in a day or two. In other words, love me until death parts us. For the rest of my time here. For the remainder of my consciousness.

I think the message is more: drop your defenses and seize the love before you, for it's lights out before long. Don't be shortsighted.

Well, yes and no.

I think that's definitely what the speaker in the poem is telling her lover, and one could certainly conclude that's what she feels, but I guess I'm a little skeptical about her actual honesty, as I said, and could still see the same couple having the "Thursday" conversation later, when the end of the world fails to come.

What if, for example, she added the line "Ooh Baby, did you get that bruise when you fell from heaven?" Would that make it seem that, perhaps, she was just putting the moves on the guy and willing to say anything to further her cause? Because I'm already suspecting that to be the case.

As I say above, I've never read Edna's work, and know very little about her, but last night I did find a short online bio here which I think reinforces some of my points. On the matter of her love life (quote):

Millay had found the ideal husband in Boissevain. He attended to all the household chores, traveled widely with his "Vincent"--often to Florida, the Riviera, and Spain--and cooperated with her intellectual and linguistic interests. He catered to her whims and even condoned her having an occasional lover. One, George Dillon, who was fourteen years her junior and whom she met in 1928 while giving a reading at the University of Chicago, inspired Fatal Interview (1931), a 52-sonnet sequence. In one sonnet she snarls: "Love me no more, now let the god depart, / If love be grown so bitter to your tongue!" Nonetheless, Dillon and Millay collaborated later on translations from Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1936). Still later, in a sonnet in Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939), she says, "As God's my judge, I do cry holy, holy, / Upon the name of love however brief." .....

....In 1944 Millay suffered a nervous breakdown and was unable to write for two years. During this time and later, her husband catered to her so selflessly that he depleted his own reserves of strength and died in 1949 of lung cancer followed by surgery and a stroke. Millay, who with her husband had drunk to excess since the 1930s, evidently grew more dependent on alcohol during her brief, inconsolable widowhood. She died sitting at the foot of her staircase, alone, at Steepletop.

(endquote) As many sites like this one explain, she had many lesbian relationships throughout her life (I could make a joke here about Vassar girls, but will resist the tempation), and thus we can't really even say what the gender is of the object of affection in many of her works. My primary point here, would be that the author had some decidedly atypical romantic experiences, and depending upon what aspect of her complex romantic history she was trying to depict in any specific poem, it's quite difficult to determine precisely what her actual motivation is.

Do you think Millay believe in after life since the poem reads Not only underground are the brains of men Eatn bt maggots

Welcome to the blog, Katrina! How nice to revisit this poem.

My sense of the poem is that she does not believe in an afterlife. At least, there's no mention of one in this poem. She talke about life as "empty," "uncarpeted," and offers a gruesome image of underground maggots...one diesn't get the impression she has muh belief in an afterlife.