American

Edna St. Vincent Millay

1892–1950


Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) was an American poet and playwright, born in Rockland, Maine. She became famous at nineteen with "Renascence", published in 1912 and collected in Renascence and Other Poems (1917). She studied at Vassar College and afterwards lived in Greenwich Village, New York, where her lyrics and sonnets of love, loss and independence made her a leading voice of the 1920s.

Her collection The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the first awarded to a woman for poetry. This edition takes her poems from the London volume Poems (Martin Secker, 1923) and adds two poems from Renascence and Other Poems that Secker omitted. She died at her home at Steepletop, near Austerlitz, New York, in 1950.

  1. Renascence
  2. God’s World
  3. Afternoon on a Hill
  4. Journey
  5. Sorrow
  6. Tavern
  7. Ashes of Life
  8. The Little Ghost
  9. Kin to Sorrow
  10. Three Songs of Shattering
  11. The Shroud
  12. The Dream
  13. Indifference
  14. Witch-Wife
  15. Blight
  16. When the Year Grows Old
  17. Sonnet I
  18. Sonnet II
  19. Sonnet III
  20. Sonnet IV
  21. Sonnet V
  22. Sonnet VI (Bluebeard)
  23. My candle burns at both ends
  24. Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand
  25. Recuerdo
  26. Thursday
  27. To the Not Impossible Him
  28. The Singing-Woman from the Wood’s Edge
  29. Humoresque
  30. She is Overheard Singing
  31. The Unexplorer
  32. Grown-Up
  33. The Penitent
  34. Daphne
  35. Portrait by a Neighbour
  36. The Merry Maid
  37. To S. M.
  38. The Philosopher
  39. Sonnet VII
  40. Sonnet VIII
  41. Sonnet IX
  42. Sonnet X
  43. Spring
  44. City Trees
  45. The Blue-Flag in the Bog
  46. Eel-Grass
  47. Elegy before Death
  48. The Bean-Stalk
  49. Weeds
  50. Passer Mortuus Est
  51. Pastoral
  52. Assault
  53. Travel
  54. Low-Tide
  55. Song of a Second April
  56. The Poet and his Book
  57. Alms
  58. Inland
  59. To a Poet that Died Young
  60. Wraith
  61. Ebb
  62. Elaine
  63. Burial
  64. Mariposa
  65. Doubt no more that Oberon
  66. Lament
  67. Exiled
  68. The Death of Autumn
  69. Ode to Silence
  70. Memorial to D. C.
  71. Sonnet XI
  72. Sonnet XII
  73. Sonnet XIII
  74. Sonnet XIV
  75. Sonnet XV
  76. Sonnet XVI
  77. Sonnet XVII
  78. Sonnet XVIII
  79. Sonnet XIX
  80. Sonnet XX
  81. Sonnet XXI
  82. Sonnet XXII
  83. Wild Swans
  84. Interim
  85. The Suicide
  86. Pity Me Not
  87. I Shall Go Back
  88. The Pear Tree
  89. My Heart, Being Hungry
  90. Autumn Chant
  91. Nuit Blanche
  92. Three Songs from the Lamp and the Bell: I
  93. Three Songs from the Lamp and the Bell: II
  94. Three Songs from the Lamp and the Bell: III
  95. The Wood Road
  96. Feast
  97. Souvenir
  98. Scrub
  99. The Goose-Girl
  100. The Dragonfly
  101. Departure
  102. The Return from Town
  103. A Visit to the Asylum
  104. The Spring and the Fall
  105. The Curse
  106. Keen
  107. The Betrothal
  108. The Pond
  109. The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver
  110. Never May the Fruit Be Plucked
  111. The Concert
  112. Hyacinth
  113. To One Who Might Have Borne a Message
  114. Siege
  115. The Cairn
  116. Spring Song
  117. Memory of Cape Cod
  118. Sonnet: When you, that at this moment are to me
  119. Sonnet: That Love at length should find me out and bring
  120. Sonnet: Love is not blind. I see with single eye
  121. Sonnet: I know I am but summer to your heart
  122. Sonnet: I pray you if you love me, bear my joy
  123. Sonnet: Sometimes when I am wearied suddenly
  124. Sonnet: Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!
  125. Sonnet: Here is a wound that never will heal, I know
  126. Sonnet: Say what you will, and scratch my heart to find
  127. Sonnet: What’s this of death, from you who never will die?
  128. Sonnet: I see so clearly now my similar years
  129. Sonnet: Your face is like a chamber where a king
  130. Sonnet: The light comes back with Columbine; she brings
  131. Sonnet: Lord Archer, Death, whom sent you in your stead?
  132. Sonnet: Loving you less than life, a little less
  133. Sonnet: I, being born a woman and distressed
  134. Sonnet: What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why
  135. Sonnet: Still will I harvest beauty where it grows
  136. Sonnet: How healthily their feet upon the floor
  137. Sonnet: Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
  138. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: I
  139. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: II
  140. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: III
  141. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: IV
  142. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: V
  143. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: VI
  144. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: VII
  145. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: VIII
  146. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: IX
  147. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: X
  148. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: XI
  149. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: XII
  150. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: XIII
  151. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: XIV
  152. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: XV
  153. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: XVI
  154. Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree: XVII

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