Poetry of the Week: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Sunday night events conspired to set me researching a gap in my knowledge: for all my focus on Romanticism and the Gothic, I know very little about how these literary movements spread and changed in America. Honestly, I know very little about the American literary tradition to begin with. But I was specifically searching for my love, Gothic Romanticism, and so I skipped over the known quantity of Poe, disregarded the evolution of modern horror genres in America, and kept searching for a poet who evoked the qualities of mortality and transcendence I associate with my favorite poets and poems.

And I mostly drew a blank. I wasn't doing in depth research, to be fair, but the moment you search around for Gothic in America, you get less about Poe's poetry and more about Poe's prose. If you search for New England, you get history lessons in Weird Fiction (which I do enjoy, but was not my focus). And as is usually true, if you're doing an initial shallow pass, all the names graciously offered up to you are male, usually white.

Eventually I found Edna St. Vincent Millay. A name that sounded vaguely familiar, but ultimately not one I knew. She's a 20th century poet, and it might not be entirely fair or accurate to tie her to a literary tradition decades and an ocean away, but if you read "Renascence" below, you'll see why she echoes that to me. More importantly, however, she was an activist and from what little I've been able to dig into, a fascinating person. She won multiple awards for her poetry, including being the third woman to win the Pulitzer for same. She spoke out against injustices in her time, including some ways and instances that remind me of issues we're facing today.

I'd love to tell you more about her, but I haven't had the time to do more research. I fell asleep Sunday night wishing I could devote myself fully to researching philosophy and poetry and all the ways the writings of the past decades and centuries are still alarmingly relevant to our current struggles. This morning I woke up and looked at the ice slick sidewalks and grey-white sky and wanted nothing more than to sit down at my desk with a mug of tea and write New England horror stories. But Sunday night I prepared for Monday work and went to sleep, and today I sat down at a different desk and did the work that pays me.

I like my job. I enjoy my coworkers. I'm paid well. I have flexibility and interesting challenges. But at the end of the day I know that I'm choosing between the best version of myself and the version who can donate to help cover my friends' medical expenses. I will continue fighting for health care, food, and shelter for all. And to all of the people who say that with government assistance no one would work, I counter with a question: How many poets have we lost because they couldn't feed themselves? Or if art doesn't matter to you, how many brilliant, cancer-curing scientists had to sacrifice their chances at education to take care of their loved ones? How far could we have progressed as a culture and a species if so many weren't scrabbling simply to survive in a world of increasingly artificial scarcity? Why is it a bad thing that robots are taking over jobs and freeing up humans to focus on other concerns? In an ideal world, the one that we should be constantly striving toward, we should all be free to choose our own paths. But we're not there yet, and too many have been convinced that's not even worthwhile to work toward. I hope that changes.

I'll keep thinking about what that means for me, and giving you some of the fruits of my free time here. This year, that will mostly mean female American poets, because I'm upset to know so few.

But you came here for poetry, and so please enjoy:

Renascence
All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line 
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from; 
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.

Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.

But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I’ll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And -- sure enough! -- I see the top! 
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I ‘most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.

I screamed, and -- lo! -- Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky,
The ticking of Eternity.

I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore.
The Universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense
That, sick’ning, I would fain pluck thence
But could not, -- nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck
My lips away till I had drawn
All venom out. -- Ah, fearful pawn!
For my omniscience paid I toll
In infinite remorse of soul.

All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight 
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.

And all the while for every grief,
Each suffering, I craved relief
With individual desire, --
Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire
About a thousand people crawl;
Perished with each, -- then mourned for all!

A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
I saw at sea a great fog bank
Between two ships that struck and sank;
A thousand screams the heavens smote;
And every scream tore through my throat.

No hurt I did not feel, no death
That was not mine; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry
From the compassion that was I.
All suffering mine, and mine its rod;
Mine, pity like the pity of God.

Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me!
My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was no room for it without.
And so beneath the weight lay I
And suffered death, but could not die.

Long had I lain thus, craving death,
When quietly the earth beneath
Gave way, and inch by inch, so great
At last had grown the crushing weight,
Into the earth I sank till I
Full six feet under ground did lie,
And sank no more, -- there is no weight
Can follow here, however great.
From off my breast I felt it roll,
And as it went my tortured soul
Burst forth and fled in such a gust
That all about me swirled the dust.

Deep in the earth I rested now;
Cool is its hand upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.
And all at once, and over all
The pitying rain began to fall;
I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatched roof,
And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who’s six feet underground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.

The rain, I said, is kind to come
And speak to me in my new home.
I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
And then the broad face of the sun
Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth
Until the world with answering mirth
Shakes joyously, and each round drop
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.

How can I bear it; buried here,
While overhead the sky grows clear
And blue again after the storm?
O, multi-colored, multiform,
Beloved beauty over me,
That I shall never, never see
Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold,
That I shall never more behold!
Sleeping your myriad magics through,
Close-sepulchred away from you!
O God, I cried, give me new birth,
And put me back upon the earth!
Upset each cloud’s gigantic gourd
And let the heavy rain, down-poured
In one big torrent, set me free,
Washing my grave away from me!

I ceased; and through the breathless hush
That answered me, the far-off rush
Of herald wings came whispering
Like music down the vibrant string
Of my ascending prayer, and -- crash!
Before the wild wind’s whistling lash
The startled storm-clouds reared on high
And plunged in terror down the sky,
And the big rain in one black wave
Fell from the sky and struck my grave.

I know not how such things can be;
I only know there came to me
A fragrance such as never clings
To aught save happy living things;
A sound as of some joyous elf
Singing sweet songs to please himself,
And, through and over everything,
A sense of glad awakening.
The grass, a-tiptoe at my ear,
Whispering to me I could hear;
I felt the rain’s cool finger-tips
Brushed tenderly across my lips,
Laid gently on my sealed sight,
And all at once the heavy night
Fell from my eyes and I could see, --
A drenched and dripping apple-tree,
A last long line of silver rain,
A sky grown clear and blue again.
And as I looked a quickening gust
Of wind blew up to me and thrust
Into my face a miracle
Of orchard-breath, and with the smell, --
I know not how such things can be! --
I breathed my soul back into me.

Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I
And hailed the earth with such a cry
As is not heard save from a man
Who has been dead, and lives again.
About the trees my arms I wound;

Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;
I raised my quivering arms on high;
I laughed and laughed into the sky,
Till at my throat a strangling sob
Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb
Sent instant tears into my eyes;
O God, I cried, no dark disguise
Can e’er hereafter hide from me
Thy radiant identity!

Thou canst not move across the grass
But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,
Nor speak, however silently,
But my hushed voice will answer Thee.
I know the path that tells Thy way
Through the cool eve of every day;
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart!

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky, --
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat -- the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.

Tea Blends: Wizard and Moon Updates!

Scrolling through Adagio's catalog a couple of weeks ago, I found that they carry dried ginger! So I immediately purchased some, (along with a few other mix-ins), and went to revisit some of my ginger-based blends. The dried ginger is everything that I wanted it to be, and unsurprisingly superior to chopping up bits of candied ginger that you happen to have at home.

That said, the recipes require a little tweaking to handle the new ingredient:

Faithful of the Moon (Revised)
For every teaspoon of white tea,
 - 1/4 teaspoon lapsang souchong
 - 1/8 teaspoon of sage
 - 1/8 teaspoon ginger
 - a pinch of lavender (or better yet, jasmine)
Steep at ~180°F for four or five minutes.

The changes: The sharpness of the ginger means that it can be halved from the original recipe, and finally reaching something closer to the flavor profile I'd been aiming at means that the sage can take more of a center stage. The lavender, on the other hand, needs to be dialed back. I didn't have any jasmine on hand, unfortunately, but from the get go I wanted this to be a jasmine blend, since the dried flowers look like little moons, and with the new ginger/sage flavor I think the jasmine would finally work.

Wizards Tea (Revised)
For every teaspoon of breakfast blend (in this case, an Irish Breakfast tea),
 - 1/4 teaspoon lapsang souchong
 - 1/4 teaspoon whole peppercorns
 - 1/8 teaspoon candied ginger
 - 1/8 teaspoon of orange rind
 - a pinch of red pepper flakes
 - 1/4 stick of cinnamon
Steep at boiling for ~5 minutes.

The changes: Again, the dried ginger has a much stronger and sharper flavor than the candied, and should be halved in this recipe. Additionally, the change enhances the spiciness, so I recommend dialing back on the red pepper flakes.

I'm much happier with both of these blends now, and once I track down some jasmine I might mix up a larger batch of the Gibbous Moon blend to drink more regularly.

I make no promises regarding regularity of tea updates here in the future, but there are a few posts lingering on my queue of old, and I'm still making new blends off and on. I'm trying one out currently that's nothing to write home about and has no particular theme, but I'll see about sharing such thoughts here more often.