Edna St. Vincent Millay, Passionate Poet, Candle-Lit Feminist
Edna St. Vincent Millay in “The First Fig” suggests to both men and women
that their lives should be self-regulated candles.
My candle burns at both ends, /It will not last the night, /But ah my foes and oh my friends, /It gives a lovely light! Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay positioned this poem first and titled it "The First Fig" in her 1922 book of poems called, A Few Figs From Thistles. The poem expresses the dual nature of human beings and the brevity of human life. It is a symbol of the inner and outer journeys that all people take-one end of the candle the soul and the other end of the candle the outward reflection of the soul.
"My Candle Burns At Both Ends..."
"My candle burns at both ends" is an Eighteenth Century phrase that Nathan Bailey defined literally in his Dictionarium Britannicum, 1730. Candles were so valuable that the idea of lighting both ends immediately suggested reckless waste because candles could only be lit at both ends when they were held horizontally, which caused them to drip
and burn out quickly.
In the Eighteenth Century the candle burning at both ends symbolized a husband at one end, and a wife on the other, an interpretation that matched Eighteenth Century society’s perception of a woman’s role. Time transcended and transformed the meaning of a candle burning at both ends to symbolize a person ceaselessly working both day and night. In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth century women were usually the ones who worked around the clock.
Edna St. Vincent Millay learned early about dual societal roles and working around the clock. Born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892, she lived in a house between mountain and sea bookends and the dual scents of herbs drying on the porch mingling with smell of the piney woods. Her father Henry Millay, a schoolteacher, and her mother Cora Buzelle Millay, divorced after several years of marriage, leaving Edna and her two sisters Norma and Kathleen to live in genteel but not intellectual poverty.
In this late Nineteenth Century, women had managed to fan the flames of their individual candles to burn brighter. The progressive spirit of feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and thousands of anonymous women who worked across the country for women’s rights had stirred winds of change that swirled around the world and swept in the ideas of suffrage and equality. "Vincent" as her family called Edna, inhaled some of these winds.
Edna, her mother Cora, and her sisters settled in Camden, Maine, in a house that Cora’s aunt owned. In Camden, Edna began to write the poetry and plays that would earn her literary fame. At age 14, she won the St. Nicholas Gold Badge for poetry, the first of her many literary accolades.
"It Will Not Last The Night..."
By the time she turned 18, Edna had finished the first part of "Renascence," her first long poem and at age 20, she had completed the poem and ascenceentered it in a poetry contest in The Lyric Year. "Renascence" won fourth place, but both the judges and other contestants felt that it deserved first place, including the first place winner Orrick Johns.
After the contest controversy, Caroline B. Dow, Dean of the New York Y.W.C.A. Training School, heard Edna reciting her poetry and playing the piano at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, Maine, and she offered to pay for Edna’s education at Vassar College. At age 21, Edna entered Vassar and after she graduated in 1917, she moved to New York to live in Greenwich Village. In 1923 at age 22, Edna won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The Harp-Weaver.
As Edna St. Vincent Millay grew older, she developed a fierce independence and a feminist perspective as well as an unapologetic bi-sexuality. In 1923, Edna St. Vincent Millay married Eugen Boissevain, widower of Inez Milholland who had died of pernicious anemia in 1916. Inez Milholland had been a tireless suffragist, labor lawyer, World War I correspondent, and influential activist in the women’s movement in America, and Edna meshed with this tradition.
Living their own interpretation of the candle ends symbolism of marriage, Edna and Eugen lived like two bachelors, remaining "sexually open" all through their twenty-six-year marriage. Eugen Boissevain successfully managed Edna’s literary career, setting up readings and public appearances for her. Edna and Eugen spent most of their married life at Steepletop, their home in Austerlitz, New York.
"But Ah My Foes and Oh My Friends..."
After a period of living a Bohemian, "flaming youth" in Greenwich Village, Edna St. Vincent Millay increasingly turned her vision toward the nation and the world, as if she realized that eventually flaming youth extinguishes itself and middle and old age must continue to feed the fire.
In her later years, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s work focused on the inner and outer journeys of both people and nations. She became truly connected to her soul and her work reflected the connection while she continued to live out her feminist principles.
The execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists from South Braintree, Massachusetts, who were tried and convicted-many historians feel unjustly- of robbery and murder, drew near in the summer of 1927. Still burning the candle at both ends, Edna fought for their lives. She contributed a poem that she called "Justice Denied in Massachusetts," to the fund for their defense campaign, and she also personally appealed to the governor of Massachusetts.
In August 1927, the Boston police arrested poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay, playwright John Howard Lawson, William Patterson of the American Negro Congress and other "death watch" demonstrators in Boston. Edna had expected to be arrested and when she returned to New York she said, "Some of us have been thinking and talking too long without doing anything. Poems are perfect; picketing sometimes, is better."
Edna St. Vincent Millay also published three verse plays and she wrote the libretto for The King’s Henchman, one of the few American grand operas.
In 1940, Edna published an argument against isolationism in The New York Times Magazine, arguing that "There are no islands anymore." During World War II, she wrote about the Nazi massacre of Lidice, a Czechoslovak village that the Nazi’s eradicated in retaliation for the supposed involvement of the villagers in the murder of SS Leader Reinhard Heydrich. She wrote, "The whole world holds in its arms today, The murdered village of Lidice, Like the murdered body of a little child, Innocent, happy, surprised at play."
"It Gives A Lovely Light"
Eugen Boissevain died in 1949, and Edna St. Vincent Millay followed him in 1950. Women have been burning the candle at both ends and giving an often unrecognized lovely light throughout history. Edna St. Vincent Millay's life leaves a lighted literary path to this truth and reminds women that they must continue to burn their candle flames to refine and
redefine their candlestick grip on human rights.
References
Millay, Norma, editor.Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay.(Harper & Row, 1956.
McClatchy, J.D., editor.Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems American Poets Project, 7: Library of America, 2003.
Epstein, Daniel Mark. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay .Henry Holt & Company, 2001.
Milford, Nancy.Nancy Milford. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House, 2001.
Meade, Marion. Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. Doubleday, 2004.|
that their lives should be self-regulated candles.
My candle burns at both ends, /It will not last the night, /But ah my foes and oh my friends, /It gives a lovely light! Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay positioned this poem first and titled it "The First Fig" in her 1922 book of poems called, A Few Figs From Thistles. The poem expresses the dual nature of human beings and the brevity of human life. It is a symbol of the inner and outer journeys that all people take-one end of the candle the soul and the other end of the candle the outward reflection of the soul.
"My Candle Burns At Both Ends..."
"My candle burns at both ends" is an Eighteenth Century phrase that Nathan Bailey defined literally in his Dictionarium Britannicum, 1730. Candles were so valuable that the idea of lighting both ends immediately suggested reckless waste because candles could only be lit at both ends when they were held horizontally, which caused them to drip
and burn out quickly.
In the Eighteenth Century the candle burning at both ends symbolized a husband at one end, and a wife on the other, an interpretation that matched Eighteenth Century society’s perception of a woman’s role. Time transcended and transformed the meaning of a candle burning at both ends to symbolize a person ceaselessly working both day and night. In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth century women were usually the ones who worked around the clock.
Edna St. Vincent Millay learned early about dual societal roles and working around the clock. Born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892, she lived in a house between mountain and sea bookends and the dual scents of herbs drying on the porch mingling with smell of the piney woods. Her father Henry Millay, a schoolteacher, and her mother Cora Buzelle Millay, divorced after several years of marriage, leaving Edna and her two sisters Norma and Kathleen to live in genteel but not intellectual poverty.
In this late Nineteenth Century, women had managed to fan the flames of their individual candles to burn brighter. The progressive spirit of feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and thousands of anonymous women who worked across the country for women’s rights had stirred winds of change that swirled around the world and swept in the ideas of suffrage and equality. "Vincent" as her family called Edna, inhaled some of these winds.
Edna, her mother Cora, and her sisters settled in Camden, Maine, in a house that Cora’s aunt owned. In Camden, Edna began to write the poetry and plays that would earn her literary fame. At age 14, she won the St. Nicholas Gold Badge for poetry, the first of her many literary accolades.
"It Will Not Last The Night..."
By the time she turned 18, Edna had finished the first part of "Renascence," her first long poem and at age 20, she had completed the poem and ascenceentered it in a poetry contest in The Lyric Year. "Renascence" won fourth place, but both the judges and other contestants felt that it deserved first place, including the first place winner Orrick Johns.
After the contest controversy, Caroline B. Dow, Dean of the New York Y.W.C.A. Training School, heard Edna reciting her poetry and playing the piano at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, Maine, and she offered to pay for Edna’s education at Vassar College. At age 21, Edna entered Vassar and after she graduated in 1917, she moved to New York to live in Greenwich Village. In 1923 at age 22, Edna won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The Harp-Weaver.
As Edna St. Vincent Millay grew older, she developed a fierce independence and a feminist perspective as well as an unapologetic bi-sexuality. In 1923, Edna St. Vincent Millay married Eugen Boissevain, widower of Inez Milholland who had died of pernicious anemia in 1916. Inez Milholland had been a tireless suffragist, labor lawyer, World War I correspondent, and influential activist in the women’s movement in America, and Edna meshed with this tradition.
Living their own interpretation of the candle ends symbolism of marriage, Edna and Eugen lived like two bachelors, remaining "sexually open" all through their twenty-six-year marriage. Eugen Boissevain successfully managed Edna’s literary career, setting up readings and public appearances for her. Edna and Eugen spent most of their married life at Steepletop, their home in Austerlitz, New York.
"But Ah My Foes and Oh My Friends..."
After a period of living a Bohemian, "flaming youth" in Greenwich Village, Edna St. Vincent Millay increasingly turned her vision toward the nation and the world, as if she realized that eventually flaming youth extinguishes itself and middle and old age must continue to feed the fire.
In her later years, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s work focused on the inner and outer journeys of both people and nations. She became truly connected to her soul and her work reflected the connection while she continued to live out her feminist principles.
The execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists from South Braintree, Massachusetts, who were tried and convicted-many historians feel unjustly- of robbery and murder, drew near in the summer of 1927. Still burning the candle at both ends, Edna fought for their lives. She contributed a poem that she called "Justice Denied in Massachusetts," to the fund for their defense campaign, and she also personally appealed to the governor of Massachusetts.
In August 1927, the Boston police arrested poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay, playwright John Howard Lawson, William Patterson of the American Negro Congress and other "death watch" demonstrators in Boston. Edna had expected to be arrested and when she returned to New York she said, "Some of us have been thinking and talking too long without doing anything. Poems are perfect; picketing sometimes, is better."
Edna St. Vincent Millay also published three verse plays and she wrote the libretto for The King’s Henchman, one of the few American grand operas.
In 1940, Edna published an argument against isolationism in The New York Times Magazine, arguing that "There are no islands anymore." During World War II, she wrote about the Nazi massacre of Lidice, a Czechoslovak village that the Nazi’s eradicated in retaliation for the supposed involvement of the villagers in the murder of SS Leader Reinhard Heydrich. She wrote, "The whole world holds in its arms today, The murdered village of Lidice, Like the murdered body of a little child, Innocent, happy, surprised at play."
"It Gives A Lovely Light"
Eugen Boissevain died in 1949, and Edna St. Vincent Millay followed him in 1950. Women have been burning the candle at both ends and giving an often unrecognized lovely light throughout history. Edna St. Vincent Millay's life leaves a lighted literary path to this truth and reminds women that they must continue to burn their candle flames to refine and
redefine their candlestick grip on human rights.
References
Millay, Norma, editor.Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay.(Harper & Row, 1956.
McClatchy, J.D., editor.Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems American Poets Project, 7: Library of America, 2003.
Epstein, Daniel Mark. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay .Henry Holt & Company, 2001.
Milford, Nancy.Nancy Milford. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House, 2001.
Meade, Marion. Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. Doubleday, 2004.|
