Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born less than twenty years after G.K. Chesterton but it might have been centuries; she was a writer of the 20^th century, more narrowly of the 1920’s, and he was not. Many, perhaps a majority, of her poems are addressed to her lovers, male or female, actual or imagined. The Ballad of the White Horse is dedicated to Chesterton’s wife.

An old anecdote about Boston society ends with: “Sir. Sexual intercourse is no substitute for a formal introduction.” Millay makes it into a poem:

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 my 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.

“Why should I be always of my own opinion?” (Heinrich Heine, attributed)

Millay would agree, as illustrated by a pair of sonnets.

“Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow“

Were you not lovely I would leave you now.
After the feet of beauty fly my own.

And “Love is not blind“

“… Well I know
What is this beauty men are babbling of;
I only wonder why they prize it so.

In a more serious line, also about love:

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; 
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink 
And rise and sink and rise and sink again; 
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, 
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; 
Yet many a man is making friends with death 
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. 
It well may be that in a difficult hour, 
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, 
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power, 
I might be driven to sell your love for peace, 
Or trade the memory of this night for food. 
It well may be. I do not think I would. 

For something very different:

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

And for readers who find a sonnet — Millay wrote a lot of sonnets — too long:

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! 

And:

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: 
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

One makes friends with death¹ not by dying but by ceasing to want to live.

Millay never did:

Conscientious Objector

I shall die, but 
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; 
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself: 
I will not give him a leg up. 

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where 
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll. 

I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends 
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much, 
I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city 
are safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome.

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1. In “love is not all,” quoted above.