Joanne: “My candle burns at both ends. It will not last the night, but ah, my foes and oh, my friends, it gives a lovely light.” Abram: Hello, I'm Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And I am Joanne Diaz. Abram: And this is Poetry for All. Joanne: Abram, before we talk about Edna St. Vincent Millay's remarkable poem, could I just say something about the fact that our podcast was nominated as one of the best DIY podcasts by the Podcast Academy this year. Do you think of yourself as a DIY person typically? Abram: It’s a regular sort of garage band podcast we got going here. But it's a whole thing, we could fly to Las Vegas for this. This is big. Joanne: I was thinking of getting like a sequin top, and maybe a special champagne flute. We're not going to be able to go to Las Vegas for the event, but we can watch on zoom. It'll be streaming. Abram: I just want to give a super long thank you speech until they hook me off. They start playing the music and they usher me off and everyone's like embarrassed for me. That's all. That's all I want. Joanne: That's my goal is just complete embarrassment. That would be amazing. I just, I appreciate that they named us as finalists because I know there's so many really popular podcasts that are very well funded and they have Patreon this and sponsor that and a whole team of producers and editors helping them. But really the past two and a half years, it's been just the two of us. And, but somehow this little thing we've been doing has appealed to some people and boy do I appreciate that. So I just wanted to recognize that. Abram: Today, we're going to move on to Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she's got a poem called "She had forgotten how the August night”. Would you like me to read this poem for us? Joanne: I would love that. Abram: [to read this poem, visit this link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148568/she-had-forgotten-how-the-august-night] Joanne: Ooh, that was a good reading. Oh my goodness. Okay, Abram, of all of the English literature classes that you have taken in your life, of all the ones that you have taught, at which point have you ever studied an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem in any of those classes? Abram: Exactly never. Joanne: Same here. Abram: That's crazy. Joanne: Never. And yet she was the second person to ever win the Pulitzer Prize in America. She was incredibly prolific. If you ever check out her collected poems, it's a giant tome. She was, in her young life, the most popular poet. There was no one more popular than her at the height of the Great Depression, she was capable of selling like 50,000 books in one week. We're talking a level of stardom that is absolutely unprecedented in American letters. And yet by the time she dies, she had fallen out of favor in American letters. And I think it was the second edition of the Oxford book of American verse, which was a very important anthology of American literature; she wasn't included at all. Abram: Yeah, they took her right out. So one of the things we had to look into, and this poem gets into it, she was very open about her sexuality. She had an open marriage. And what's interesting is that a person like her who was You know, considered a model of the new woman and compared to Sappho as this great, bisexual, wonderful poet talking about love all the time and doing it with such skill and such power that she would be incredibly popular as well. Joanne: Yeah, I love what you're saying there and I think that's important to keep in mind. context. She's born in 1892 into very modest financial circumstances. She couldn't afford to go to college. Thankfully, someone, a benefactor, allowed her to go to college on scholarship at Vassar. But she was strapped for money in her young life. But she's born into a culture where suddenly this concept of the new woman, an emancipated woman who wanted to live outside of the home, outside of the realm of domesticity, was suddenly becoming a really popular paradigm. She came of age in a culture that was talking about reproductive rights for women, in an age that was talking about voting rights for women, and she was all there for it. Very progressive in her politics, very bohemian in her lifestyle. She was not only a poet, she was a playwright. She was an actor. She was with the Provincetown Players, which was a really important progressive theater in Greenwich Village in New York City in the twenties. She was rubbing elbows with people like Eugene O'Neill and John Reed and Paul Robeson. This was the cultural milieu of which she was a part. And people loved her for that. But the very thing that made her so sexually appealing, her poetry that was so open, her persona that apparently she was so popular at these poetry readings that she would give, that people would just swoon. She was like a rock star, right? But then things changed for her. Abram: Yeah, so she was known for these love poems and such things but she was also politically invested and she was a pacifist and she was a sympathizer with communists, not a communist herself, but she wanted this free and equal society that she saw a lot of different political movements moving toward. But it's one thing to be known for love poetry and another thing to be known for political poetry. And when Sacco and Vanzetti, which is this big famous case in American history, when they were executed and she protested against that, she started to move from writing primarily about love and sexuality to writing about politics. And people were not ready for it. They had put her in one box, and when she went into a different box, they weren't going to have it. What's interesting is that there's so many poets, playwrights and others of the period who were doing the same sort of thing, who were very active in political poetry, political writing, who were also writing, love poems as well, but they hadn't been put into a box the way Edna St. Vincent Millay had been, and therefore they were allowed to this kind of range, but she was not allowed that kind of same kind of range. And so people started to say yeah, stay out of politics, basically. Give us the open love poems that we've loved you for but stay, that's not your zone. Stay out of politics. And this was part of her sort of fall from grace in the thirties and forties as people just weren't ready for her to be talking about these things. Joanne: It's very interesting. So there's something paradoxical there where the very thing that made her so immensely popular, it did have an effect on her critical reception as time went on. However, the beautiful thing about Edna St. Vincent Millay is that she was a very prolific correspondent and her sister Norma worked tirelessly to preserve her literary estate. And as a result of that, researchers have been able to rekindle interest in recent decades. So it's precisely because we have such an excellent archive of this correspondence and other kinds of records that someone like Nancy Milford was able to produce a critical biography, Savage Beauty, a couple of decades ago. And that was one of several books that really helped to resuscitate the literary reputation of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Abram: Yeah. So if you think about this, that literary biography comes out in 2001. And one of the functions and effects of a literary biography is to show you how important a writer actually was. Also to make sense of their works, but also to just put them back on the scene. And that book really does it. So in 2006, the Oxford book of American poetry comes out with another edition and lo and behold, Edna St. Vincent Millay is back. back. She was taken out in 1976 and in 2006 she was restored. And when David Lehman restores her, this is what he says. One of the many things that he says about her. He says, “no longer do we need to punish Edna St. Vincent Millay for enjoying her sexuality or for having committed the even worse crime of being tremendously popular early in her life.” Joanne: Wow. That's it, isn't it? It's as if the literary canon punished her for being so good. Abram: Yeah. And this is so good. Let's get to this poem here. This just shows her facility with the sonnet style. So she was known for her sonnets in particular. She is extremely good with that form. But when I say that somebody is a master of the sonnet, when somebody is super good at the sonnet form, part of what I mean when I think of that is, they've mastered exactly where the turns come, exactly where the stops come, and the language feels extremely natural, even as it fits into this form, even as the rhymes fall into place. And then it seals itself up at the end. And so you have this single insight, single thought, this single little song all wrapped up tight in this package, and yet it feels almost effortless almost as if she's just talking to you. Joanne: I like that. And, we have covered so many sonnets on this podcast, the vast majority of which have been written by men. And, historically it is a male poetic form and by that, I just mean that it has its origins in a rhetorical position of the male author who is pining for an absent object of desire. That's where it comes from with Petrach, Shakespeare, Sidney, Wyatt, et cetera. But here it's always interesting to see what a woman poet will do with the form. Abram: Yeah. And I just think. Yeah. And just to emphasize that point, sonnets, whenever you write a sonnet, they speak into this very long tradition and exactly as you say, where the tradition often begins is this pining for an absent object of desire. And if you look at what she's doing in this poem, it's almost the exact opposite, right? Here's this very normal boy and he's just here. I'm not definitely not pining for him and he's definitely not absent, maybe we should just, have a role in the hay anyway. So it's just like a total flip of the entire 700 year tradition, at least where it began from this woman's point of view. And she gets into it though, by talking about this shift from the sort of boring daylight, noontime hour to the kinds of mysteries that moonlight makes possible. Joanne: “She had forgotten how the August night / Was level as a lake beneath the moon, / In which she swam a little, losing sight / Of shore; and how the boy, who was at noon / Simple enough, not different from the rest, / Wore now a pleasant mystery as he went, / Which seemed to her an honest enough test / Whether she loved him, and she was content.” Abram: Content. Is that what you want to hear? I'm content. Joanne: No. Two people are infatuated with each other. If one says to the other, I am content, the moonlight on your body is an honest enough test. Abram: It was sort of like “ah okay”. Joanne: Is there a tone of, what would you say, resignation here or a sense of this is sufficient, it's honest enough, I am content? Abram: One of the things I see playing out in this poem is this back and forth between control and decision and a kind of willing letting go of control. So on the one hand, as we're talking about here with the word content and so on. She's making this choice. That is, he's not choosing her, she's choosing him. So she's deciding. At the same time, the decision that she makes is colored by this sort of willing giving up of herself, swimming out into the lake of this moonlight, losing sight of shore a little bit, letting herself go a little bit and one of the famous novels that she might be playing off of here is Kate Chopin wrote a novel in 1899 called The Awakening. The awakening in The Awakening is in part an awakening of sexual desire and her desire to explore that. And anyway, that book (spoiler alert) ends with her swimming off and losing sight of shore quite intentionally and letting herself go, in that book in an act of suicide, of letting herself go, letting herself drown by losing sight of shore intentionally. Here, she's of course not doing that, but she is, it feels like she's making a reference to this very famous book about awakening sexual desire in this losing sight of shore, swimming out a little too far, but intentionally letting herself go a little bit. And of course, the main character of that novel, The Awakening, her first name is Edna. Joanne: I like that because she's swimming. I sense, and I could be wrong, that she's beholding the night and is maybe in awe of it, and is maybe transported by it a bit. Is that what you read? Abram: Yeah, absolutely. And I love this little touch, too, there, where the losing side of shore goes over the line. “Losing sight” ends one line, “of shore” starts the next line. And I love that little touch because it's almost as though she's losing sight of the shoreline of the line ending itself, right? Like where did that line ending go? Oh, up shore, right? So anyway, I get it. A kind of sign that she knows exactly what she's doing in this sonnet writing. Joanne: Yeah. And also, sonnets are so small that every word and phrase matters. Look what she does. “And how the boy who was at noon / Simple enough, not different from the rest, / Wore now a pleasant mystery as he went, / Which seemed to her an honest enough test, / Whether she loved him.” And she uses enough twice. He may not be everything, but he's enough. And maybe enough is actually pretty good. Abram: Yeah. At least for this night, one of the poetic traditions she's playing off of is this carpe diem, seize the day, these poems that were written 1600s and so on, when it's a man basically writing to a woman saying, we got to seize this day. We're only young for so long. What if we die tomorrow? Let's seize the day, carpe diem. And so there's this issue, there's this way in which she's playing with that tradition as well. In the day itself, everyone is boring. So it's more seize the night. And it's not so much seize as yeah, okay, let's do this. Joanne: Yeah. Yeah. And then she continues with that pattern of repetition, right? “So loud, the million crickets’ choir… / So sweet the night, so long drawn out and late… / And if the man were not her spirit's mate, / Why was her body sluggish with desire?” Abram: I love this. So what she's doing here, and you can't hear, but you can see if you're looking at the poem as she's using these ellipses at the end of the line. And so again, it's this sign of letting the mystery be, letting the lines hang there, letting them be drawn out exactly as something is going on off screen. What do you see in those ellipses? Joanne: Yeah I like that a lot. I'm very interested, as you say, in how indeterminate the elements are, the rhetorical elements are in this poem. And I feel that indeterminacy in those two ellipses. And the repetition, so loud the million crickets choir, so sweet the night, so long drawn out and late, and then there's that pause, it just trails off. And I feel like there are certain elements that poets and dramatists can use to indicate speechlessness. I think that ellipses is one of them. And the word, Oh, just that letter O is another. In one case, Oh, is an exclamation that indicates that the character or speaker is beyond speech in the case of ellipses. There is this deep pause and a sort of trailing off, which suggests that speech is no longer either necessary or possible. Abram: And then you get this question, right? “And if the man”, now man, right? Interestingly, in the octet, the first eight lines, it was a boy. Now, whatever's going on. “And if the man were not her spirit's mate, / Why was her body sluggish with desire?” You and I were talking before about this phrase, sluggish with desire. Is that what you want to hear? Say it's Valentine's Day. Do you want to hear someone say, “I am sluggish with desire?” How do you interpret this phrase and this line? Joanne: Whenever I've seen a slug , they're slow and they're wet… I'm just gonna leave that. Abram: It's long drawn out, right? Joanne: Long, drawn out, yes. I don't think that the speed of the slug suggests that this is a definitive decision. It makes me think about other elements of the poem where there is contentedness. There is enoughness and there's desire, but it's sluggish. Abram: One of the ways to read sluggish is, one of the definitions of sluggish is that you're not alert, that you've let down your sort of alertness. Joanne: Yeah. Abram: And so there too, the kind of letting yourself swim out from shore, lose sight of shore a little bit, let down your guardrails, not be so alert. There's a kind of letting go. There's a giving in to this body's desire. But interestingly, this split between the spirit and the body. So she's admitting up front there's no way I would marry this guy, right? Like we are not soulmates. This is not a long term commitment. This is not going anywhere. But for the night, for the moonlight, I’m sluggish with desire. Let's find the shadows. Joanne: Yeah. Okay. And then that allows us to go to that final sentence. “Stark on the open field the moonlight fell, / But the oak tree’s shadow was deep and black and / secret as a well.” Abram: The opening image is a lake in which she's losing herself, drifting from shore, the kind of feeling of a little bit of possible danger, lack of control. A well, that's life giving. Joanne: But if you're at the bottom of the well, that's not so great. And I'm wondering if she's at the bottom of the well. Abram: Let's just be upfront about it, that a tunnel like long, deep, black well has other associations. Joanne: Sluggish associations, yes. Oh dear. Abram: When we talk about her popularity, her openness about her sexuality, you can see it's an openness, both in terms of talking about what she's doing, but also, as you see in this poem, she is open. while also talking and covering it up and speaking of it in mysterious ways. And I think this might be part of the popularity of the time. It's mysterious. It's left out there. There's a kind of hiddenness that's also open to the whole thing. Joanne: Many of her most famous poems are famous precisely because they have such memorable, memorizable lines. But I like this one precisely because it has this air of mystery to it. It's very interesting. And I don't know if you agree with this, but it feels very modern to me, if I'm being honest. Abram: Yeah, absolutely. And this sense of what is enough? Honestly, I think that's a question that a lot of her poems are asking: What is enough? Joanne: And the answer for her in her life, the answer was it was insatiable. She had an insatiable desire that was never fully filled in her personal life, as well as in her poetry. Abram: Which brings us right back to where we began, right? “My candle burns at both ends. It will not last the night, but ah, my foes and oh, my friends. It gives a lovely light.” Joanne: So true. Yeah. What a wonderful epigram. Abram: Would you read this poem for us one more time? Joanne: I'd be happy to. [poem] Abram: That's great. So good. If you would like to learn more about Edna St. Vincent Millay, you can see our website at poetryforall.fireside.fm. Joanne: And you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And we hope that you'll subscribe if you like what you've heard today. Abram: If you're sluggish. Joanne: Then don't. Abram: I am sluggish with desire for more Poetry for All. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.