The Library will be closed on Sunday, March 31, 2024, in observance of Easter

Fourth and Final February Love Poem of the Week!

Christa Deitrick, Librarian, Literature & Fiction Department,
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Thanks for sticking with me all month long. I hope you liked the poems. Last but not least is an entry from Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay (called "Vincent" by her friends) was a beautiful, talented girl who first garnered fame at the age of 20 for her poem "Renascence." She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, and that same year married Eugen Boussevain (pictured left), a self-proclaimed feminist and stay-at-home husband who gave up his own pursuits to manage his wife's literary career. Millay described their marriage, which endured until Boussevain's death in 1948, as "sexually open." The following poem reflects the theme of semi-unrequited love that such a match might bring. It is generally agreed that Millay penned it about herself.

Witch-Wife

She is neither pink nor pale,
And she will never be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun 'tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she will never be all mine.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

Recommended Reading

Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems
Savage Beauty (biography)
What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: the Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay


 

 

 

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