Poetry
Renascence
Edna St. Vincent Millay · 1912
Synopsis
From where she stands, the voice of the poem sees only three long mountains and a wood, three islands in a bay, and finds these limits too close. She reaches out her hand, touches the sky, and the Infinite descends upon her. She then feels all the guilt and all the suffering of the world, a fire, a man's hunger in Capri, ships going down, as if every death were her own. She calls for death; the earth gives way under her weight and buries her, and the rain begins to fall on her grave.
Context
In August 1912, at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, a former Vassar student, Caroline B. Dow, hears the young woman recite and will open the university to her. The poem appears in November in The Lyric Year, an anthology of a hundred poems whose best were ranked by three judges by points. The editor Ferdinand Earle places it first, the other two judges do not retain it, and it finishes fourth, just behind the prizes. The affair causes a scandal: the winner, Orrick Johns, will judge his prize undeserved and does not attend the banquet given in his honour, and another prizewinner gives his two hundred and fifty dollars to the author. The poem gives its title to the first collection, in 1917.
Who it is for
Two hundred and fourteen short rhymed lines, in a few long stanzas. The fervour is constant and today's reader may find it laboured.
Prizes and reception
The poem that made her known at twenty and earned her the admiration of established poets.
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