April is National Poetry Month! Edna St. Vincent Millay, "I Too Beneath Your Moon"

If I had to pick just one Millay poem, it probably wouldn't be this--I'd go for Dirge Without Music, or Not for a Nation, or Conscientious Objector, or Love is Not All, or the whole sequence of Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree, or Epitaph for the Race of Man, or that thing that runs through my brain every spring, New England Spring 1942, or...well, you see why this woman is my favorite poet in all the world.

But if I had to pick just one poem to explain Millay, this is the one.


Edna St. Vincent Millay, untitled sonnet.

I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex
Go forth at nightfall crying like a cat,
Leaving the lofty tower I laboured at
For birds to foul and boys and girls to vex
With tittering chalk; and you, and the long necks
Of neighbors sitting where their mothers sat
Are well aware of shadowy this and that
In me, that's neither noble nor complex.
Such as I am, however, I have brought
To what it is, this tower; it is my own;
Though it was reared To Beauty, it was wrought
From what I had to build with; honest bone
Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought;
And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.


Oh this woman.