Collected Poems – Edna St. Vincent Millay (1956)

S$57.00

Collected Poems – Edna St. Vincent Millay (1956)

S$57.00

A collection by one of America’s most acclaimed female poets and feminist activists.

Title: Collected Poems

Author: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Publisher: Harper & Brothers, 1956.

Condition: Hardcover, no dust jacket. Very good Faded spine, small sticker to endpaper. No other defect. 738pp. App 9″ by 6″.

SKU: millay-collected Categories: ,

About the poet (from Wikipedia):

Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950) was an American poet and playwright. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry, and was also known for her feminist activism. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work. The poet Richard Wilbur asserted, “She wrote some of the best sonnets of the century.

MINSTREL, what have you to do
With this man that, after you,
Sharing not your happy fate,
Sat as England’s Laureate?
Vainly, in these iron days,
Strives the poet in your praise,
Minstrel, by whose singing side
Beauty walked, until you died.

Still, though none should hark again,
Drones the blue-fly in the pane,
Thickly crusts the blackest moss,
Blows the rose its musk across,
Floats the boat that is forgot
None the less to Camelot.

Many a bard’s untimely death
Lends unto his verses breath;
Here’s a song was never sung:
Growing old is dying young.
Minstrel, what is this to you:
That a man you never knew,
When your grave was far and green,
Sat and gossipped with a queen?

Thalia knows how rare a thing
Is it, to grow old and sing;
When a brown and tepid tide
Closes in on every side.
Who shall say if Shelley’s gold
Had withstood it to grow old?