Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

135 Sourced Quotes

Many a bard's untimely death
Lends unto his verses breath;
Here's a song was never sung:
Growing old is dying young.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home to a leaky castle across the sea to lie awake in linen smelling of lavender, and hear the nightingale, and long for me.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
I find that I never lose Bach. I don't know why I have always loved him so. Except that he is so pure, so relentless and incorruptible, like a principle of geometry.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
But you were something more than young and sweet And fair, - and the long year remembers you.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Birds that cannot even sing —
Dare to come again in spring!

Edna St. Vincent Millay
And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you all through my life?-sharing my fire, my bed, Sharing-oh, worst of all things!-the same head?- And, when I feed myself, feeding you too?

Edna St. Vincent Millay
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.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
To a Young Poet Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird. Bird and wing together Go down, one feather. No thing that ever flew, Not the lark, not you, Can die as others do.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Death devours all lovely things;
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness—presently
Every bed is narrow.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Please don't think me negligent or rude. I am both, in effect, of course, but please don't think me either.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would note In me a beauty that was never mine, How first you knew me in a book I wrote, How first you loved me for a written line....

Edna St. Vincent Millay
The fabric of my faithful love
No power shall dim or ravel
Whilst I stay here, — but oh, my dear,
If I should ever travel!

Edna St. Vincent Millay
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I And hailed the earth with such a cry As is not heard save from a man Who has been dead, and lives again. About the trees my arms I wound; Like one gone mad I hugged the ground; I raised my quivering arms on high; I laughed and laughed into the sky...

Edna St. Vincent Millay
I dread no more the first white in my hair,
Or even age itself, the easy shoe,
The cane, the wrinkled hands, the special chair:
Time, doing this to me, may alter too
My sorrow, into something I can bear.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning;

Edna St. Vincent Millay
But you are mobile as the veering air,
And all your charms more changeful than the tide,
Wherefore to be inconstant is no care:
I have but to continue at your side.
So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,
I am most faithless when I most am true.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Time does not forfeit; Time does not abstain;
The future in one fist, he eats the past.
I know this; yet again and yet again
I try to hold the present, make it last
One moment, that the simple great be slain
Not unperceived. No hope — Time eats so fast.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
And, through and over everything,
A sense of glad awakening.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
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.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Dust in an urn long since, dispersed and dead
Is great Apollo; and the happier he

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Father, I beg of Thee a little task To dignify my days, 'tis all I ask.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
We think-although of course, now, we very seldom Clearly think- That the other side of War is Peace.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
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.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Blessed be Death, that cuts in marble What would have sunk to dust!

Edna St. Vincent Millay
When we are old and these rejoicing veins
Are frosty channels to a muted stream,
And out of all our burning there remains
No feeblest spark to fire us, even in dream,
This be our solace: that it was not said
When we were young and warm and in our prime,
Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead,
Sleeping away the unreturning time.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
On and on eternally
Shall your altered fluid run,
Bud and bloom and go to seed;
But your singing days are done

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Cold of the sun's eclipse When cocks crow for the first time hapless, and dogs in kennel howl Abandoning the richly-stinking bone, And the star at the edge of the shamed and altered sun shivers alone, And over the pond the bat but not the swallow dips And out comes the owl.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
O troubled forms, O early love unfortunate and hard,
Time has estranged you into a jewel cold and pure

Edna St. Vincent Millay