Edna St. Vincent Millay - Collected Poems

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This book, when I am dead, will be A little faint perfume of me. People who knew me well will say, She really used to think that way.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Oh, children, growing up to be Adventurers into sophistry, Forbear, forbear to be of those That read the rood to learn the rose.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more! Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore! And all for a pledge that was not pledged by me, I have kissed thy crust and eaten sparingly That I might eat again, and met thy sneers With deprecations, and thy blows with tears,...

Edna St. Vincent Millay
The heart grows weary after a little Of what it loved for a little while.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Beauty in all things-no, we cannot hope for that; but some place set apart for it.

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
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
Blessed be Death, that cuts in marble What would have sunk to dust!

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

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
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
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 saw and heard, and knew at last The How and Why of all things, past, and present, and forevermore.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Youth, have no pity; leave no farthing here For age to invest in compromise and fear.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
No one but Night, with tears on her dark face, watches beside me in this windy place.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Night falls fast. Today is in the past. Blown from the dark hill hither to my door Three flakes, then four Arrive, then many more.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
I will come back to you, I swear I will; And you will know me still. I shall be only a little taller Than when I went.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Now the autumn shudders
In the rose's root.
Far and wide the ladders
Lean among the fruit.
Now the autumn clambers
Up the trellised frame,
And the rose remembers
The dust from which it came.
Brighter than the blossom
On the rose's bough
Sits the wizened orange,
Bitter berry now;
Beauty never slumbers;
All is in her name;
But the rose remembers
The dust from which it came.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Pour away despair and rinse the cup. Eat happiness like bread.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
And life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse...

Edna St. Vincent Millay
The young are so old, they are born with their fingers crossed.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
That which has quelled me, lives with me, Accomplice in catastrophe.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Progress — progress is the dirtiest word in the language — who ever told us —
And made us believe it — that to take a step forward was necessarily, was always
A good idea?

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart. I took your thrust, whereby I since am slain, And I lie disheveled in the grass apart, A sodden thing bedrenched by tears and rain.

Edna St. Vincent Millay