April is National Poetry Month!

This poem, along with the musical 1776, is one of the only things capable of making me a feel a genuine sense of patriotism and a wholly enthusiastic kinship with my country. (Which is, yes, hideously ironic. Shush.) This is late Millay, quite a departure from her earlier, more traditionally structured works. I love it hugely, and if more free-verse read as well as this does, I'd like it better.

You really, really have to read this aloud to begin to get how well it flows. It just opens the whole thing up.

BTW, if this exists in full-text anywhere else on the web, I can't find it, so unless you've read Millay in dead tree form, this is probably going to be new to you. I hope you all appreciate my aching wrists.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Not For a Nation."

Not for a nation:
Not for the dividing, the estranging, thing
For;
Nor, in a world so small, the insulation
Of dream from dream--where dreams are links in the chain
Of a common hope; that man may yet regain
His dignity on earth--where before all
Eyes: small eyes of elephant and shark; still
Eyes of lizard grey in the sub-tropic noon,
Blowing his throat out into a scarlet, edged with cream incredible balloon
Suddenly, and suddenly dancing, hoisting and lowering his body on his short legs on the hot stone window-sill;
And the eyes of the upturned, grooved and dusty, rounded, dull cut-worm
Staring upward at the spade,--
These, all these, and more, from the corner of the eye see man, infirm
Tottering like a tree about to fall,--
Who yet had such high dreams--who not for this was made (or so said he),--nor did design to die at all.

( Not for a nation: )