Thread: Millay's Child
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Unread 03-18-2003, 10:48 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Location: San Diego, CA, USA
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Am I reading this wrong?
I hope not, or else I'm wrong, too. Then again, my readings are spectacularly wrong at times, so my endorsement doesn't necessarily mean yours is right!

I'd never heard of alkanet before, so I looked it up in Webster's and learned that this plant is grown commercially for a red dye made from its root. Perhaps this is significant, since in the poem Millay's use of it prevented "that famous blush of hair" from being "defiled/With gray".

Can anyone shed light on that Wednesday and Thursday business in L7? At first I thought this might be alluding to that old days-of-the-week rhyme, but the most common version doesn't seem appropriate here:

...Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,...


I seem to recall a variant along the lines of

...Wednesday's child is full of laughter,
Thursday's child [something] after,


but I couldn't find a trace of it with a Google search. I did run across this page--
http://www.english.com.br/teachers/t...et/superst.htm

--which lists other variants for Wednesday and Thursday, but none of these seems appropriate in the context of the poem. Then again, I've barked up the wrong tree before, and will do so again. If anyone else has a better explanation for the Wednesday/Thursday references, I'd enjoy hearing it.

Julie Stoner
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