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April is National Poetry Month!
Apr. 27th, 2008 03:58 pmThis sonnet from "Epitaph for the Race of Man" might have been my first encounter with Millay aside from the ubiquitous "First Fig" ("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!"). It's quoted in Pamela Dean's (Tam Lin, The Secret Country) Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, which is not as well known on the geek circuit, and not quite as gripping as the above works, but excellent nonetheless, and a good book to read if you're feeling a lack of strong female friendships in fiction. Protagonist and title character Gentian is an amateur astronomer (and she has an attic room with a cupola, which is fucking awesome; I always wanted one of those), and her best friend and poet Becky reads this poem to her during of of their sleepovers.
When I started reading Millay, I bought a collection of her sonnets specifically to get the whole sequence of "Epitaph" so I could read this again.
XIII
His heatless room the watcher of the stars
Nightly inhabits when the night is clear;
Propping his mattress on the turning sphere,
Saturn his rings or Jupiter his bars
He follows, or the fleeing moons of Mars,
Till from his ticking lens they disappear....
Whereat he sighs, and yawns, and on his ear
The busy chirp of Earth remotely jars.
Peace at the void's heart through the wordless night,
A lamb cropping the awful grasses, grazed;
Earthward the trouble lies, where strikes his light
At dawn industrious Man, and unamazed
Goes forth to plough, flinging a ribald stone
At all endeavour alien to his own.
When I started reading Millay, I bought a collection of her sonnets specifically to get the whole sequence of "Epitaph" so I could read this again.
XIII
His heatless room the watcher of the stars
Nightly inhabits when the night is clear;
Propping his mattress on the turning sphere,
Saturn his rings or Jupiter his bars
He follows, or the fleeing moons of Mars,
Till from his ticking lens they disappear....
Whereat he sighs, and yawns, and on his ear
The busy chirp of Earth remotely jars.
Peace at the void's heart through the wordless night,
A lamb cropping the awful grasses, grazed;
Earthward the trouble lies, where strikes his light
At dawn industrious Man, and unamazed
Goes forth to plough, flinging a ribald stone
At all endeavour alien to his own.
