POETS Day! At Home with Edna St Vincent Millay

Millay by Pond (photo by Arnold Genthe, 1914)

Vyacheslav Volodin is the speaker of the Duma, and Reuter’s says he’s warning “that if the West gave permission for such [military] strikes deep into Russian territory then it would lead to a ‘global war with the use of nuclear weapons.’”

David Lammy, UK Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs and someone I’ve heard of, tells us global warming is “is systemic. Pervasive. And accelerating towards us.”

The Detroit Lions have a pretty good football team. Google “two headed goat” and find a world of images. George R.R. Martin isn’t even bothering to write the final book. It’s getting end-timey. Do you really want to squander your shrinking allotment by working?

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out and see the world while the world’s still there. And if David Lammy’s wrong, all the better. Have a great Friday afternoon. But first, some verse.

***

I made the mistake of reading an article about Rachmaninoff. It was a good article, “Rachmaninoff reigns” by David Dubal, The New Criterion, September 2023, but it contained the following:

“Studying his pianism is an exhilarating experience, and, although Rachmaninoff wrote for his own enormous hands, few pianists can resist reveling in the growths of his exotic pianistic gardens.”

I don’t know very much about classical music. There are pieces I enjoy and those that I don’t. I did very much enjoy Rachmaninoff, but now I’m preoccupied when listening. The mechanics of piano playing are beyond me. I smashed my grandparents’ Steinway upright at age four or five to the patient applause of aunts and uncles, so I know how the sound is generated, but my expertise ends there. I assume that if I’m watching a pianist move his hands very quickly, he’s doing something worth applauding but otherwise I’m in the dark as to what is hard to play and what is idling.

I used to passively but happily listen to Rachmaninoff. Now I’m guessing and fussing over what’s being done to the keyboard. Can an average hand span play that? Is this pianist really good or was he the only one with enough reach? Why don’t they make tinier keyboards? My experience is discontinuous, peppered with annoying questions. David Dubal did that.

Some people have problems watching actors whose off-screen life or political views offend them. They have trouble containing the face onscreen. My mom was like that. That Greta Garbo woman… Maybe not Garbo, but there were a few whose politics she didn’t care for and couldn’t get past. That’s never bothered me. In part, it’s because Sean Penn is so talented. I think he’s a Castro coddling jackass with an alleged history of domestic abuse, but he can act. Clooney isn’t someone I’d want to discuss world affairs with, but he’s damn cool on screen. I joke that I take a Hellenic view of the profession. I don’t, but I think it’s a funny line. Off-screen antics don’t often sour me on a show. It can, but only in extreme cases. It’s not like they’re playing themselves.

My mom wasn’t alone. Ask Jane Fonda.

Conversely, I am swayed by an actor’s reported good deeds. Keanu Reeves is supposed to be a really nice guy to work with. Nicholas Cage buys beer for and hangs out with electricians and sound crews; grips and gaffers and other made-up jobs. I like that. Learn the prop folks’ kids name and I’ll cut you some slack on Con Air.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was vocal on social issues. She was a feminist; a “renowned feminist” according to Wikipedia. She was not fond of capitalism, declaring herself a socialist though not, she insisted, a communist. Again, per Wikipedia, she said she was “almost a fellow-traveller with the communist idea as far as it went along with the socialist idea.” I’m not sure what to make of that. Socialism meant “a free and equal society.” Then she wrote “The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all.”

I don’t know why I let that bother me so much. I couldn’t leave that statement behind while reading her work, which is extraordinary considering I love so much of Ezra Pound’s poetry. I’ve had a great deal of trouble since reading that line considering anything she wrote to be genuine. That’s a frustration. Before I came across the “servants” quote, she was a great source of reliably good short lyrics. Not a Yeats or Auden, but prolific; an afternoon well spent and plenty left for another day. After: Leona Helmsley.

Inert Perfection
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

“Inert Perfection, let me chip your shell.
You cannot break it through with that soft beak.
What if you broke it never, and it befell
You should not issue thence, should never speak?”

Perfection in the egg, a fluid thing,
Grows solid in due course, and there exists;
Knowing no urge to struggle forth and sing;
Complete, though shell-bound. But the mind insists

It shall be hatched… to this ulterior end:
That it be bound by Function, that it be
Less than Perfection, having to expend
Some force on a nostalgia to be free.

I don’t know that she was serious. I’ve made servant jokes. I don’t have servants to hate, but I’ve speculated about missing silver. Wikipedia’s source for the quote is a book called At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson. The Amazon blurb tells us the author takes us “on a room-by-room tour through his own house and using each room to explore the vast history of the domestic artifacts we take for granted.” I don’t see there being a page in “one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life” set aside to expose one suffragette’s hypocrisy.

Further, Millay was in a horrible car accident that left her in chronic pain. Is it possible she wrote in pique after a nurse or maid suggested she’d had her pill allotment for the day?

Some Things Are Dark

Some things are dark—or think they are.
But, in comparison to me,
All things are light enough to see
In any place, at any hour.

For I am nightmare: where I fly,
Terror and rain stand in the sky
So thick, you could not tell them from
That blackness out of which you come.

So much for “where I fly”: but when
I strike, and clutch in claw the brain—
Erebus, to such brain, will seem
The thin blue dusk of pleasant dream.

I’m not buying the At Home book. I’ll never read it. I’ll never know the context. One line shouldn’t merit a prejudice when there’s a lifetime of work and honorable civic participation. But it bugs me. I wish it didn’t. She writes charming verse.

Humoresque

“Heaven bless the babe!” they said.
“What queer nooks she must have read!”
(Love, by whom I was beguiled,
Grant I may not bear a child.)

“Little does she guess to-day
What the world may be!” they say.
(Snow, drift deep and cover
Till the spring my murdered lover.)

A Little Housekeeping: I keep notes as I read through commentary and biographical information about a week’s poet. Anything interesting or macabre gets jotted down and referred to when I’m putting together the post. I failed to double check last week and it wasn’t until the James Hogg entry was posted that I realized I left out an extraordinary tidbit I have to share: James Hogg was seriously injured in a curling incident. He may be the only one ever.