[A. E. Stallings]

Actually, "rime" and "rhyme" are both correct. I tend to use "rime" for a couple of reasons. First, I'm lazy (one less letter to type). Second, the "rhyme" spelling suggests a dubious Greek etymology, likening it to "rhythm." "Rime" to me suggests its English/Germanic roots--it's a bit more old fashioned, perhaps. But the spelling is just a matter of preference. "Rhyme" perhaps looks nicer. I go back and forth.

[Golias]

I am always glad, Nyctom, to promote this one.Please enjoy it.

The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver

"Son," said my mother,
When I was knee-high,
"you've need of clothes to cover you,
and not a rag have I.

"There's nothing in the house
To make a boy breeches,
Nor shears to cut a cloth with,
Nor thread to take stitches.

"There's nothing in the house
But a loaf-end of rye,
And a harp with a woman's head
Nobody will buy,"
And she began to cry.


That was in the early fall.
When came the late fall,
"Son," she said, "the sight of you
Makes your mother's blood crawl, --

"Little skinny shoulder-blades
Sticking through your clothes!
And where you'll get a jacket from
God above knows.

"It's lucky for me, lad,
Your daddy's in the ground,
And can't see the way I let
His son go around!"
And she made a queer sound.


That was in the late fall.
When the winter came,
I'd not a pair of breeches
Nor a shirt to my name.

I couldn't go to school,
Or out of doors to play.
And all the other little boys
Passed our way.

"Son," said my mother,
"Come, climb into my lap,
And I'll chafe your little bones
While you take a nap."

And, oh, but we were silly
For half and hour or more,
Me with my long legs,
Dragging on the floor,

A-rock-rock-rocking
To a mother-goose rhyme!
Oh, but we were happy
For half an hour's time!

But there was I, a great boy,
And what would folks say
To hear my mother singing me
To sleep all day,
In such a daft way?

Men say the winter
Was bad that year;
Fuel was scarce,
And food was dear.

A wind with a wolf's head
Howled about our door,
And we burned up the chairs
And sat upon the floor.

All that was left us
Was a chair we couldn't break,
And the harp with a woman's head
Nobody would take,
For song or pity's sake.


The night before Christmas
I cried with cold,
I cried myself to sleep
Like a two-year old.

And in the deep night
I felt my mother rise,
And stare down upon me
With love in her eyes.

I saw my mother sitting
On the one good chair,
A light falling on her
From I couldn't tell where.


Looking nineteen,
And not a day older,
And the harp with a woman's head
Leaned against her shoulder.

Her thin fingers, moving
In the thin, tall strings,
Were weav-weav-weaving
Wonderful things.

Many bright threads,
From where I couldn't see,
Were running through the harp-strings
Rapidly,

And gold threads whistling
Through my mother's hand.
I saw the web grow,
And the pattern expand.

She wove a child's jacket,
And when it was done
She laid it on the floor
And wove another one.

She wove a red cloak
So regal to see,
"She's made it for a king's son,"
I said, "and not for me."
But I knew it was for me.

She wove a pair of breeches
Quicker than that!
She wove a pair of boots
And a little cocked hat.

She wove a pair of mittens,
She wove a little blouse,
She wove all night
In the still, cold house.

She sang as she worked,
And the harp-strings spoke;
Her voice never faltered,
And the thread never broke,
And when I awoke, --


There sat my mother
With the harp against her shoulder,
Looking nineteen,
And not a day older,

A smile about her lips,
And a light about her head,
And her hands in the harp-strings
Frozen dead.

And piled beside her
And toppling to the skies,
Were the clothes of a king's son,
Just my size.

[nyctom]

Dear Golias:

Thank you so much for posting Harp Weaver. It should, by all my postmodern cynacism, make me go ugh no phooey, but instead it makes me sigh (though I would long to tell the boy, Keep the Mom, bag the clothes. And move to a warmer climate.). So a question for you: what does Millay do to save this from bathos? HOW does she do it? Because she is certainly waving a red flag at the bull of sentimentality, but always manages to sidestep it. I would be curious to hear your opinion.

Thanks.

[Golias]

nyctom, she simply transcends sentimentality. This is a different and higher level of sentiment, a higher level of poetry. It is not a product of calculation but of pure inspiration. Notice that the wonderful fifth lines in several stanzas do not fall at regular intervals but only appear where the spirit of the poem calls for them.

Who are these alleged "post-modernists" who foolishly decry keen and palpable sentiment in poetry? It is a cheap response, unworthy of an honest mind. Such creatures do not exist so far as I'm concerned. They are not part of the universe.

G.

[Len Krisak]

Golias,

Alas, they are everywhere. I wish this were not so.

I just finished Daniel Mark Epstein's new bio
of Millay, and sentimental as this poem may seem
(or sublime, if you prefer--and I generally do, with
some reservations), it actually evokes the
circumstances of Millay's family during some very
cold winters. The father was long gone, and
Millay's mother--whom she worshipped--apparently
came close to working her fingers to the proverbial
bone--all the while she taught the girls Art, Music,
and Poetry. A pretty affecting tale if you read the
details, although I do not mean to imply that the bio
necessarily changes our interpretation or valuation
of the poem.

The bio's pretty good, too, by the way. Some
quibbles, but what the hey.

[Esther Cameron]

Good to see Millay again here --

At the Last Judgment's bar I shall cheerfully say,
"I have always admitted to liking Millay."

Below another favorite. -- Esther

THE RETURN

Earth does not understand her child,
Who from the loud gregarious town
Returns, depleted and defiled,
To the still woods, to fling him down.

Earth can not count the sons she bore:
The wounded lynx, the wounded man
Come trialing blood unto her door;
She shelters both as best she can.

But she is early up and out,
Top trim the year or strip its bones,
She has no time to stand about
Talking of him in undertones

Who has no aim but to forget,
Be left in peace, be lying thus
For days, for years, for centuries yet,
Unshaven and anonymous;

Who, marked for failure, dulled by grief,
Has traded in his wife and friend
For this warm ledge, this alter leaf:
Comfort that does not comprehend.

[Leda333]

At first it seemed a little long to me, too, but I wonder how much of that is due to modern ears -- the same way Henry James' (or other 19th-century writers) dialogue seems "dated" to us now. Keeping it going for that long in the meter she chose is pretty virtuosic. Death as a "spongy wall" and "sticky river" are some arresting images. I think part of the problem with reading Millay now is a handful of poems of hers are very famous, and tend to overpower the main body of her work, like the sonnets; which I agree are very good.

Moira Russell
Seattle, WA

[Leda333]

"Glad to see some attention being paid to Millay.
If not a master, she is still very good and wrote
quite a few poems that deserve to last."

I don't know about others, but I like the emphasis on "great poems" rather than a "great poet." I think it was Randall Jarrell who said a good poet is someone who manages to get struck by lightning once or twice; the great poet manages it five or six times. Ranking gets tiresome after a while.

"Did you know that Hardy admired her work and thought her
one of the best poets of the time?"

As best I can recall, I think Hardy said America had produced two great things: New York's skyscrapers and Millay's poetry. Not often we think of Hardy as being such a modernist, but he was.

Moira Russell
Seattle, WA

[Annie Finch]

I have really enjoyed reading this discussion, and not least the Millay poems posted here.

Re issues raised about "The Harp-Weaver," one way it avoids sentimentality, I think, is with a heavy dose of Gothic sensibility. It is not a cloyingly sweet sentimentality but has a horrifying edge.

I have always found the ending of the poem quite ambiguous, even ironic. The words "just my size" underscore the fact that the kid has now clothes to wear to the mother's funeral, but is shooting up like a weed, and soon enough these magic clothes will no longer fit, and who will be there to find clothes to replace them? The child is an orphan now, which is certainly worse than being ill-clad.

I could see this whole poem on one level as a kind of ironic take on the "self-sacrificing mother" imagery of so much nineteenth-century poetry--the mother's vaunted sacrifice is ultimately damaging to the child. The ending is almost comic in its placing the value of a mother versus the value of a pile of clothes, however nice they are...

On one level I can see this poem as a rather hostile allegory for the ways that children are ultimately damaged by mothers who put their own needs aside too much in the service of the "self-sacrificing female" ideal. I wonder if the biographies, which I haven't read, shed light on this? I know Millay was very close with her mother--how much of her own creativity had her mother sacrificed? At any rate, these other levels make the poem more complex and interesting.

Re the sonnets--several of my favorites have already been posted; here's another, which I post from memory so forgive any misrememberings:


I shall go back again to the bleak shore
and build a little shanty on the sand
in such a way that the extremest band
of brittle seaweed shall escape my door
but by a yard or two. And nevermore
shall I return to take you by the hand;
I shall be gone to what I understand,
and happier than I ever was before.
The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
the words that lay a moment on your tongue,
are one with all that in a moment dies,
a little under-said and over-sung.
But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
unchanged from what they were when I was young.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Annie,


I always place that last sonnet side-by-side with a later sonnet by
Millay:

BANNED POST

Now by the path I climbed, I journey back.
The oaks have grown; I have been long away.
Taking with me your memory and your lack
I now descend into a milder day;
Stripped of your love, unburdened of my hope,
Descend the path I mounted from the plain;
Yet steeper than I fancied seems the slope
And stonier, now that I go down again.
Warm falls the dusk; the clanking of a bell
Faintly ascends upon this heavier air;
I do recall those grassy pastures well:
In early spring they drove the cattle there.
And close at hand should be a shelter, too,
From which the mountain peaks are not in view.

_____________


I have always placed Millay's sonnets with Shakespeare's--for technique,
perhaps only a handful of other poets' sonnets might compare:BANNED POST Auden,
Milton, Wordsworth,...Her ability to wrap an idea into fourteen lines is
unsurpassed by these poets, but perhaps her subject matter didn't range
as freely as it might.BANNED POST (But then, look at Shakespeare's sonnets:BANNED POST
all, all are about the lost lover or the lover about to be lost, or about
the turmoil caused by loving passionately.)


For variety, here are two sonnets from Millay's "Epitaph for the Race
of Man."BANNED POST These are still frightening; and, I have no problem imagining
their relevance to our future.BANNED POST (One can hope I might be wrong, however...)

XI


Sweeter was loss than silver coins to spend,
Sweeter was famine than the belly filled;
Better than blood in the vein was the blood spilled;
Better than corn and healthy flocks to tend
And a tight roof and acres without end
Was the barn burned and the mild creatures killed,
And the back aging fast, and all to build:
For then it was, his neighbor was his friend.
Then for a moment the averted eye
Was turned upon him with benignant beam,
Defiance faltered, and derision slept;
He saw as in a not unhappy dream
The kindly heads against the horrid sky,
And scowled, and cleared his throat and spat, and wept.


XVIII


Here lies, and none to mourn him but the sea,
That falls incessant on the empty shore,
Most various Man, cut down to spring no more;
Before hisBANNED POST prime, even in his infancy
Cut down, and all the clamour that was he,
Silenced; and all the riveted pride he wore,
A rusted iron column whose tall core
The rains have tunnelled like an aspen tree.
Man, doughty Man, what power has brought you low,
That heaven itself in arms could not persuade
To lay aside the lever and the spade
And be as dust among the dusts that blow?
Whence, whence the broadside?BANNED POST whose the heavy blade?. . .
Strive not to speak, poor scattered mouth; I know.

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTFinis (This is her concluding sonnet.)

--C.

BANNED POST

BANNED POST

[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited December 22, 2001).]