Vincent

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Reading a biography of Edna St.Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford. Very well written. She does that thing that Virginia Woolf does, and Lytton Strachey did (Woolf probably derived it from Strachey) where you give an impression of brooding over a life that rather than researching you are in effect remembering, in the way that a novelist gives the impression of remembering the lives of his invented people. Vincent (it's what Millay's sister and mother called her; her middle name actually came from St. VIncent's Hospital in New York, where her brother was treated after his ordeal of being trapped in the hold of a ship for some days beneath a heavy sack of something, living to tell the miracle of his escape) is an awesome -- ordinary former meaning not modern all-purpose approbative -- person, the most child-prodigal poet/language manipulator I've ever read about. Here she is at sixteen:


Homing bird and homing bee
Nest and hive in the apple tree;
Sweet song, sweet honey--but sweeter to me
The homing.

Nest where two crooked branches meet
Hive in the hollow trunk's retreat;
Sweet song, sweet honey -- but far more sweet
The homing.

You who drowse on weary wing,
You who sleepily, sleepily sing:
Tell me, sweeter is anything
Than homing?

She grew up rather desperately poor in Camden and Rockport Maine and environs, right around where http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif (http://lizhand.livejournal.com/profile)lizhand (http://lizhand.livejournal.com/) lives now -- mention of a trip to Lincolnville. Looked like Liz too -- whip-thin and large-eyed and a little mad, ginger-red friz of hair, too smart and ambitious to be constrained. Forebear for you there, Liz, if you don't know her

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