Twenty five years ago, the library I was working at
discarded a copy of Mine the Harvest,
the posthumously published poetry of
Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950). Millay was
an American poet and playwright, she had won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in
1923 and as we found out when we recently visited her home Steepletop in
Austerlitz, New York, she filled stadiums when she read her poetry to
enthralled audiences during post World War I.
There are many lovely poems in Mine the Harvest, but this
untitled one moved me most because it reminded me of somebody I knew:
Who hurt you so,
My dear?
Who, long ago
When you were very
young,
Did, said, became,
was...something that you did not know
Beauty could ever do,
say, be, become?--
So that your brown
eyes filled
With tears they never,
not to this day, have shed...
Not because one more
boy stood hurt by life,
No: because something
deathless had dropped dead--
An ugly, an indecent
thing to do--
So that you stood and
stared, with open mouth in which the
tongue
Froze slowly backward
toward its root,
As if it would not
speak again, too badly stung
By memories thick as
wasps about a nest invaded
To know if or if not
you suffered pain.
As it turned out, Edna St. Vincent Millay's home is probably
the most complete author's home we have ever visited and I have seen a few,
including the Alcott home where the
artistic daughter was allowed to draw pictures on the walls, the hot and humid
house where Faulkner wrote and drank and fought with his wife, the place where
Mark Twain raised his family and the real House of Seven Gables in Salem,
Massachusetts. All Vincent's furniture and knickknacks, including a painting on
her bedroom wall of two people skinny dipping, are still there. (Should I mention that she and husband had an open
marriage, that both women and men were drawn to her and that she was a sexually
liberated woman long before her time?)
Everything about the renovated Millay farmhouse called
Steepletop was fascinating, but Vincent's writing quarters were what really got
me. I now have a place to write on the third floor of my house, which is
infrequently used because of the palliative, psychiatric and thankfully
postpartum help needed by my burgeoning family, but for years I wrote in odd
places at odd times. Millay was a professional writer from the word go though,
so family members and later on her devoted husband Eugene, all made sure that
she got the time she needed. One wing of the second floor of the house seemed
to belong to her. She wrote some of her poems in bed, probably while it was
still too cold to get up, but the study beyond her private bathroom where she
wrote poetry and tracked her tours also had a long writing table and a view and
next door was a book lined room with another view and a single, comfortable
reading chair. She even had a writing
shed out in the fields, probably to use when they had visitors. Her
biographies--Savage Beauty is the one I'm reading now--indicate she had stuck
to a regular writing schedule ever since she was an impoverished, overworked
teenager and was encouraged by her mother to write. In most of the writers'
homes I've visited, female authors were lucky to have one small table by a
window with a single drawer where they could hide their papers when a visitor
came.
Though she is believed to have had two abortions (or
"miscarriages" as they were euphemistically referred to in the hidden
past when people rarely spoke of such things) Edna St. Vincent Millay never had
children, which for a woman would have rendered even her husband's help a moot point.
