Top Shelf Sunday

Content with another indoor day, I settled in with Edna St. Vincent Millay this morning, a poet I was introduced to by the female members of my family as a teenager. I own only one volume of her poetry but was given her biography, Savage Beauty written by Nancy Milford, by Bird Woman Auntie Honey probably seven years ago. While I enjoyed the biography and found her life fascinating, a tad scandalous for her time and fun to read, I never really connected with very many of her poems. That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate her craft, she just felt a little distant to me.

But, that was when I was a little younger and today I read the entire slim volume I have and appreciated each one, not just the poems with quotes my Nana used to repeat about “burning the candles at both ends.” Here are two of my favorites from today.

Snow Storm

No hawk hangs over in this air:
The urgent snow is everywhere.
The wing adroiter than a sail
Must lean away from such a gale,
Abandoning its straight intent,
Or else expose tough ligament
And tender flesh to what before
Meant dampened feathers, nothing more.

Forceless upon our backs there fall
Infrequent flakes hexagonal,
Devised in many a curious style
To charm our safety for a while,
Where close to earth like mice we go
Under the horizontal snow.

The Philosopher

And what are you that, wanting you,
I should be kept awake
As many nights as there are days
With weeping for your sake?

And what are you that, missing you,
As many days as crawl
I should be listening to the wind
And looking at the wall?

I know a man that's a braver man
And twenty men as kind,
And what are you, that you should be
The one man in my mind?

Yet women's ways are witless ways,
As any sage will tell,—
And what am I, that I should love
So wisely and so well?