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Poetry Reading: Edna St Vincent Millay

 

Edna St Vincent Millay

I shall forget you presently, my dear,

 

So make the most of this, your little day,

 

Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And oaths were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,—
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.
Edna St Vincent Millay

A Sonnet (Edna St Vincent Millay)

We talk of taxes, and I call you friend;
Well, such we are, but well enough we know
How thick about us root, how rankly grow
Those subtle weeds no man has need to tend,
That flourish through neglect and soon must send
Perfume too sweet upon us and overthrow
Our steady senses, how such matters grow
We are aware, and how such matters end.
Yet shall be told no meagre passion here;
With lovers such as we forevermore
Isolde drinks the draught, and Guinevere
Receives the table’s ruin through her door,
Francesca, with the loud surf at her ear,
Lets fall the coloured book upon the floor.

Edna St Vincent Millay.

The poem tells about the nascence of passion and its possible perils. We know the forlorn stories of Tristan and Isolde and of Lancelot and Guinevere. Yet in fact, this sonnet has more to do with Dante’s Divine Comedy, than with the mentioned medieval romances.

At the end of Canto V, Dante is talking to Francesca da Rimini, who in about 1280 was married to Gian Ciotto (‘Lame’) Malatesta, signor of Rimini. Francesca gradually fell in love with Gian Ciotto’s younger brother, Paolo. Dante might even have known Paolo personally, which in turn may explain the inclusion of this tragic story in his opus. When Gian Ciotto found outabout the adultery, he had killed both lovers. This happened probably in 1286, and Dante’s seems to be the only contemporary mention of this episode.

This is the text:

115 Then I turned to them again to speak
116 and I began: ‘Francesca, your torments
117 make me weep for grief and pity,
118 ‘but tell me, in that season of sweet sighs,
119 how and by what signs did Love
120 acquaint you with your hesitant desires?’
121 And she to me: ‘There is no greater sorrow
122 than to recall our time of joy
123 in wretchedness – and this your teacher knows.
124 ‘But if you feel such longing
125 To know the first root of our love,
126 I shall tell as one who weeps in telling.
127 ‘One day, to pass the time in pleasure,
128 we read of Lancelot, how love enthralled him.
129 We were alone, without the least misgiving.
130 ‘More than once that reading made our eyes meet
131 and drained the colour from our faces.
132 Still, it was a single instant overcame us:
133 ‘When we read how the longed-for smile
134 was kissed by so renowned a lover, this man,
135 who never shall be parted from me,
136 ‘all trembling, kissed me on my mouth.
137 A Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it.
138 That day we read in it no further’ (Canto V)

What is obviously different, is the angle at which Dante and Millay looked at Francesca’s story. In The Divine Comedy, Francesca and Paolo had been put into the Second Circle of Inferno:

37 I understood that to such torment
38 the carnal sinners are condemned,
39 they who make reason subject to desire (Canto V)

Nevertheless, as Francesca later explains,

103 ‘Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving,
104 seized me so strongly with his charm that,
105 as you see, it has not left me yet’ (Ibid.)

It is this 103rd line that Millay seems to be taking as a starting point for her poem. Faithful to Love, the author actually invites ‘Francesca’ to ‘fall the coloured book upon the floor‘. Millay’s sonnet is almost a celebration of sudden passions, and the reference to a coloured book may be construed both in medieval and contemporary sense. The reference to Francesca da Rimini links a ‘coloured book‘ to an illuminated manuscript, which is exactly what Francesca and Paolo would have been reading at the end of the 13th c. But Millay’s poem was written in the 20th c., and, whether in 1280s or in 1920s, the lovers are to be brought together by a book that narrated a love story. Surely, there were a lot of coloured books of such kind in Millay’s days?

[The English text of The Divine Comedy is taken from Princeton Dante Project].

Update:

One of the greatest Pre-Rafaelites, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was well-known for his adoration for Dante’s masterpiece. In his lifetime Rossetti illustrated The Divine Comedy many times, and certainly did not get past the Paolo and Francesca extract. His drawing (below) is an interesting reworking of a typically medieval combination of several temporal aspects of the story. On the left we see the lovers embracing each other at the moment when the book became their Galeotto; on the right we see their souls, entwined in the eternal embrace; and in the middle Dante and Virgil watch the souls’ flight. It is interesting to note Rossetti’s faithful following of Dante’s text (which manifests itself particularly in the figures of Dante and Virgil), but perhaps even more interesting is the fact that the faces of Paolo and Francesca potently remind one of Rossetti (left) and his beloved and model, Elizabeth Siddal (right).

Sonnet no. 3 (Edna St Vincent Millay)

Recently I’ve discovered the works of Edna St Vincent Millay, and I have already briefly analysed one of her sonnets here. I’ve also translated her poem, Thursday, from A Few Figs from Thistles (1922).

But I must admit, I have fallen for Four Sonnets from the mentioned 1922 collection, and especially for the sonnet no. 3. I must also admit that, as I’m writing this, I’m still very much affected by this poem. I read it as a declaration of a free-spirited woman of her love for an equally free-spirited man, or better else – to liberate ourselves of any gender connotations – a declaration of a free-spirited individual to their soulmate. I am aware that the words Millay uses to describe the object of her affection – ‘wanton’, ‘light’, ‘false’, ‘more changeful than the tide’ – do not exactly conjure an image of a nice, reliable person. But Millay projects herself as ‘faithful to love’s self alone’ and asserts that she would desert her beloved and seek another with the same ease – a hardly better image. Yet she’s not to do so because they challenge each other, their freedom constantly makes them rediscover themselves and one other, and their love for freedom ultimately binds them together.

Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!
Faithless am I save for love’s self alone.
Were you not lovely, I would leave you now:
After the feet of beauty fly my own.
Were you still not my hunger’s rarest food
And water ever to my wildest thirst,
I would desert you – think not, but I would! –
And seek another as I sought you first.
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.

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