Edna St. Vincent Millay: Oh What Lips My Lips have Kissed.

 

She was a political activist and she had many love affairs during her lifetime. She reminds me of another of my favorite femmes fatale: Tina Modotti. I have such a penchant for these vampire political-artistic personalities. Until not long ago it was fashionable for artists and intellectual types that if they have a boring, unattractive name, they would chose their hometown’s. That is the case of Hans George Kern, who was from Grossbaselitz, a country village a short distant from Dresden, Germany, and who accordingly changed his name to George Baselitz.
Etnas St. Vincent Millay took her middle name from St. Vincent hospital in New York  --something very fit for an American. There was a sentimental side to that choice though: her uncle was saved by that hospital just before she was born.

Her father was a nut with three children, including Etna. He was an alcoholic –you should confirm that out-; a SOB who never took care of them. That seems to be the reason why his wife divorced him under the term “financial irresponsibility” -wow, I thought only some Cubans were like that. It is understandable that Etna,  who used to call herself Vincent, may have hated men and started treat them like meat, growing up into a dragonfly that loved to jump from rose spine to rose spine. Good for Vincent and good for the men who got to enjoy the dragonfly trance dance. I’m envying them already. 

Vincent mother and sisters used to travel from town to town with a bunch of books, including Shakespeare’s and Milton’s. They finally settled down in Candem, Maine. Vincent may have been the only true poet of the family but she wasn’t the only rebel. Her three sisters, fittingly, never accepted authority either. A crazy family ahead of the times. Edna’s professor at school perennially refused to call her by her chosen name Vincent, calling her instead by any female name. What an offense. This is not “Don’t ask; Don’t tell” policy, this is “If someone ask you who you are; Say that you are not gay”. But she was not anyway, as testified by her many lovers, although perhaps she was already by-sexual. In any case, she was a complete human being.

After some poetry award was snitched from her she moved to Greenwich Village in New York. She went out dancing and enjoyed life despite being so poor. Some nagging critic of whom we don’t even remember his name called her "a frivolous young woman, with a brand-new pair of dancing slippers and a mouth like a valentine." she was not. She was a hot, a revolutionary feminist.

In  1923 Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver". But Alas, her reputation was hurt after she wrote “Aria da Capo”, an anti-war, pacifist play. I will not extend more in “Aria da Capo” but just to point out that Da Capo Aria is a Baroque musical form and that Johan Sebastian Bach has a famous piece http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFAcXIXWLMw that has being used as the background theme for Hannibal Lecter's saga. Weird world.

She got married when she was 31 years old or so. But that didn’t precluded her for taking other lovers; famous among them 17 years old poet George Dillon, to whom she dedicated several sonnets, among them probably the one analyzed below. Her husband, who supported her rebellious attitude against the hypocrite’ stance towards sexual freedom, didn’t mind.

In 1925 Boissevain and Vincent bought Steepletop, a home near Austerlitz, New York. They also purchased an island in Casco Bay. Maine: http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab=wl. Not bad for a poet and a political activist.

Vincent died at age 58. Her sister Norma and her artist painter husband moved to Steepletop and found the Millay Colony for the Arts on the seven acres around the house and barn, which they ran until Norma's death in 1986. The story doesn’t end there. Poet Mary Oliver visited Steepletop at age 17 and stayed there for the following seven years, helping to organize Vincent’s papers. Mary Oliver eventually became a Pulitzer winner poet on her own. In 2006, the state of New York acquired Steepletop in order to restore the farmhouse and turn it into a museum. Steepletop features a Poet's Walk leading to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s grave. Now open to the public.

What lips 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.

This nostalgic sonnet is about the long gone joys of youth. In the first two verses: “what lips my lips have kissed (…) I have forgotten”; the author makes a reference to time and aging.  Speaking in first person, she seats lonely while it rains outside, trying to remember a time in her life when there were lovers and courtiers titillating around her. In “pain” (verse 6^th), she knows that forgotten “lads” (verse 7^th) will not ask or request love or caresses from her.  In verse  9^th, personifying in reverse, she compares herself to a lonely tree, silent and in sorrow, knowing that youth is already gone and that it will never come back.

In this sonnet the first verse rimes with the 4^th, and the 2^nd with the 3rd. The first four verses make a stanza; then the following 4 verses make another stanza. The turn happens in verse 9^th, which ends with the word “tree”, this word rimes with the word “me” at the end of verse 13. The third and last stanza, starting at verse 10, is of a different rime structure; first verse of third stanza, or verse 10^th, rimes with verse 12^th; while verse 11^th rimes with verse 14^th, “before” and “more”.

There is use of metaphor in verse 13^th: “ I only know that summer sang in me”. Here, the author is establishing a analogy between the seasons and the cycle of life; summer is used to mean youth, and the fleeting time.  Imagery is used several times in the poem: verse 3-4^th: “…the rain is full of ghosts tonight…”; verse 9^th: “…thus in the winter stands the lonely tree”; verse 10^th: “…what birds have vanished”. This use of imagery serves the purpose of creating the mood of melancholy, loneliness and nostalgia that the whole poem conveys.

We see alliteration in verse 1: “ What lips my lips have kissed and where and why”. Cacophony in verse 4^th: “ …ghosts tonight that tap and sigh”. Figurative language in verses 13-14^th: “…summer sang in me… in me sings no more”, connoting the lost of youth. The whole poem is a lament of the condition of aging and the lost of the enjoyments of youth.
Note: Please, read below what commentator "Gorditamedia" says about St. Vincent being closed. It was in my mind that my post would try to help them draw more visitors, but sadly that is not possible anymore.

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