la dous ki vyen

burning both ends

“My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light!”
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

“I do not think there is a woman in whom the roots of passion shoot deeper than in me,” 20-year-old Millay wrote in her diary. “It seems to me that I am, incarnate, rapture and melancholy…. And what I have lived I have lived doubly, actually and symbolically.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Independent, flamboyant Millay, led a notoriously Bohemian life. She and the other writers of Greenwich Village were, according to Millay herself, “very, very poor and very, very merry.” She lived in a nine-foot-wide attic writing tough-minded poems about sex, betrayal and the price of being a woman. This liberated woman of her times was in poetry, a traditionalist who absorbed influences from classical English poets and was devoted to the sonnet form. She was very popular and gave poetry readings to standing room only crowds. Even in the midst of The Great Depression, Vincent’s work sold by the thousands.

She wrote openly of her many affairs, her bisexuality, and her independence as a woman in her poetry. One can hear the permission given to women of the era to ignore gender boundaries in her sonnet, “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed.”

• I BEING born a woman and distressed

  By all the needs and notions of my kind,

  Am urged by your propinquity to find

  Your person fair, and feel a certain zest

  To bear your body’s weight upon my breast,–

  So subtly is the fume of life designed,

  To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind

  And leave me once again undone, possessed.

  Think not for this, however,–the poor treason

  Of my stout blood against your staggering brain–

  I shall remember you with love, or season

  My scorn with pity; let me make it plain:

  I find this frenzy insufficient reason

  For conversation when we meet again.

  However, my favorite sonnet is the wistful “What lips my lips have kissed” about lost loves:Whatlips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

  I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

  Under my head till morning; but the rain

  Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

  Upon the glass and listen for reply;

  And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

  For unremembered lads that not again

  Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

  Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree,

  Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

  Yet know 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)

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 11:48 pm. It is filed under reviews and tagged with betrayal, bisexuality, edna st. vincent millay, passion, sex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.