Quote of the Day (Edna St. Vincent Millay, with a Different Experience of Fall)

“In the fall of the year, in the fall of the year,
I walked the road beside my dear.
The rooks went up with a raucous trill.
I hear them still, in the fall of the year.
He laughed at all I dared to praise,
And broke my heart, in little ways.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), “The Spring and the Fall,” in The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1922)
 
A century ago this month, Edna St. Vincent Millay became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. “The Spring and the Fall” was part of the collection that won her the honor.
 
This poem, which I came across in a school reader from 70 years ago, reminded me of why I have enjoyed Millay. Read in its entirety, it touches on the “ecstatic passion [and] skepticism of enduring love” that, New Yorker reviewer Maggie Doherty wrote in May 2022, represented the “great themes” of the lyric poet.

Over the last century, she has somewhat fallen out of favor with critics, despite Nancy Milford’s well-received 2001 biography, selections from the poet’s diaries published last year, and the heroic efforts of the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society to preserve Steepletop, her longtime home in Austerlitz, NY.
 
No matter. Millay may be one of those authors, like the novelist Thomas Wolfe, who survive, barely, on high school and college curricula, but continue to find readers somehow.

You can find many interesting posts on Millay on the blogosphere, but you might find especially thoughtful this February 2021 post from the Farnsworth Art Museum that feature Maine poets reading letters and poems that focus on Millay’s exploration of loss and renewal—as well as their own poems in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, personal loss, and the threat of global climate change. 

It’s a welcome reminder that, despite the intensely intimate nature of Millay’s early, best-known work, she became increasingly engaged with national and world issues as time went on.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (J.R.R. Tolkien, on ‘An Eden on This Very Unhappy Earth’)

“Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile.”— English novelist and philologist J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter (1981)

Quote of the Day (Edna St. Vincent Millay, on Love, Lies and Loss)

“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.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), “Sonnet IV,” in A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets (1922)

Born 130 years ago today in Rockport, Maine, Edna St. Vincent Millay did not resort to modernist experimentation. But, as seen here, her verses—particularly those of the first two decades of her career—are skillfully written and emotionally accessible. In her frankness about intimate subject matter, she opened the way for the more confessional poets of the post-WWII era.

Song Lyric of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, for Those We’ll ‘Meet and Live and Love Again’)

“I'll see you in my dreams
When all the summers have come to an end
I'll see you in my dreams
We'll meet and live and love again.”—American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” from his Letter to You CD (2020)
 
Bruce Springsteen, my favorite musician, was born 72 years ago today in Long Branch, New Jersey. My favorite album of his nearly five-decade career remains the first one I encountered by him as a high-school sophomore, Born To Run, a song collection revolving about youth, yearning and searching and running for a place in the world.
 
But over the last year, I have also felt an emotional tug towards the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famer’s Letter to You. Inspired partly by the loss of former bandmate George Theiss, it is not about lives in motion, but those at eternal rest. Rather than the summers of Springsteen’s youth, heated by the desires for love and all his music could achieve, he is now, as in the attached photo, accepting that winter is here.
 
Like many other people—and particularly those in my baby boomer age group—I’ve lost more than the usual number of relatives and friends in the last year, to both COVID and non-COVID-related issues. So, whenever I’ve listed to The Boss’s mournful meditation on loss and mortality, their images come to mind with insistent poignancy, along with the assurance I share with Springsteen that we’ll rejoice again in the afterlife.

Quote of the Day (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, on Friends Recalling ‘Many a Vanished Scene’)

“We sat and talked until the night,
      Descending, filled the little room;
Our faces faded from the sight,
      Our voices only broke the gloom.

“We spake of many a vanished scene,
      Of what we once had thought and said,
Of what had been, and might have been,
      And who was changed, and who was dead;

“And all that fills the hearts of friends,
      When first they feel, with secret pain,
Their lives thenceforth have separate ends,
      And never can be one again.”—American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), “The Fire of Drift-wood,” in The Seaside and the Fireside (1850)

Remarkably, Longfellow wrote this scene, of two friends in a farmhouse somberly summarizing the passage of time, when he was only 43—more than a decade away from when he would lose his second wife in a fire, and when friends would die quietly of heartbreak, having sent their sons off to perish in a civil war of unforeseen carnage.

Over the years, improved life expectancy had kept many Americans from facing the same grim death counts that Longfellow’s characters quietly lamented. But over the last few months, as COVID-19 has struck at a wider swath of people, that blessing has increasingly vanished. 

Last spring, it was not uncommon to be asked how many people one knew had contracted COVID-19, or even died of it—with the implication being that, all things considered, it really wasn’t that bad. Today, more and more people would answer both questions in the affirmative.

In addition, indirect deaths are resulting from the pandemic: doctors’ appointments and elective surgery delayed because of fear of coming down with the virus, as well as rampant isolation, depression and substance abuse.

There is also the “secret pain” glimpsed by Longfellow, the unspoken sense between once-intimate friends that they “never can be one again.”

In his time, it would have meant the separate paths people took in terms of earning a living, family life, perhaps relocation. Today, another element has been introduced into the equation: politics, which increasingly infects what was once considered the private realm. Social media have made obvious what people seldom if ever spoke about before.

The result is that, if they don’t un-friend each other on Facebook and Twitter, old friends will likely stay silent about what now divides them. Peace may be maintained, but the ease in another’s company once enjoyed has faded, like the faces of Longfellow’s friends in the evening light.

Quote of the Day (George Eliot, on Why ‘Our Dead Are Never Dead to Us Until We Have Forgotten Them’)

“Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.” —English novelist, translator, editor, and religious writer Mary Ann Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot (1819-1880), Adam Bede (1859)

Almost nothing was conventional about George Eliot: her appearance; her religious skepticism; her piercing intellect at a time when educating women was not a family priority; her longtime common-law marriage to editor George Henry Elwes; her use of a male pen name so her initial novels would be taken more seriously; and finally, her death at age 61 on this day 140 years ago, in Chelsea, England, only six months after marrying a man 20 years her junior.

She blazed her own path in literature as well, with seven novels characterized by flinty realism and high moral seriousness. In this year of COVID-19, when so many people all over the world have experienced the death of family members or dear friends, the quote above seems not only a fair sample of her attitude, but also an appropriate response to the sense of loss so many feel.

Over the years, Eliot’s detractors (e.g., Mark Twain) have correctly noted her humorlessness, adding even heavier weight to her earnestness. 

But Virginia Woolf, in a 1919 Times Literary Supplement essay on the novelist’s career, generously but judiciously summarized her achievement by noting that she “taken to heart certain lessons learnt early, if learnt at all, among which, perhaps, the most branded upon her was the melancholy virtue of tolerance; her sympathies are with the everyday lot, and play most happily in dwelling upon the homespun of ordinary joys and sorrows.”

More pointedly, Woolf observed that in the 1871 masterpiece Middlemarch, Eliot had created, “with all its imperfections…one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

(In an especially relevant post for our time, Delia da Sousa Correa of London’s Open University has written for the Institute of English Studies blog about the role of an earlier epidemic—a cholera outbreak in Britain—in Middlemarch.)

Song Lyric of the Day (Sarah McLachlan, on the ‘Deep and Endless Night’ Before Life)

“Once there was a darkness

Deep and endless night
You gave me everything you had, oh, you gave me life.”— Sarah McLachlan, Séamus Egan and Dave Merenda, “I Will Remember You,” sung by McLachlan from The Brothers McMullen: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1995)

The lyrics of “I Will Remember You” reflect, in an often literal way, their first notable context: The Brothers McMullen, a comedy-drama by novice writer-director-actor hyphenate Edward Burns in which a trio of Irish-American brothers sort out their current relationships even as they are haunted by family and cultural history.

But particularly after 9/11, the song grew into something far larger: a hushed goodbye to the dead, replayed repeatedly (helped undoubtedly as much by McLachlan’s angelic vocal as by the hymnlike melody) at funerals and other memorial services for that first great American tragedy of the 21^st century.

These days, these lyrics are reverberating far more insistently around America. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon claimed just short of 3,000 lives, but the toll so far from COVID-19 in the United States alone is already nearly 100 times that amount.

The narrator of “I Will Remember You” sings of gratitude to a lover for bringing life after “deep and endless night.” Americans are in the midst of a desolation more engulfing than one individual’s private emptiness, though. Right now, as we prepare for a darker, colder season before vaccines universally distributed assure life, all we can do is obey McLachlan’s tender but weary urging: “Weep not for the memories.”