Today's brainworm
Jun. 17th, 2008 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwLong thing about poetry below the cut...
Edna St. Vincent Millay has a poem (ok, she has a LOT of poems, but I'm talking about a particular one, bear with me) which I'm going to rudely elide from beginning to end in here, so as to say what I want to say without quoting the whole poem.
The title: Dirge Without Music.
First two lines:
"I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:"
...
Last line:
"I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned."
*sigh*
This is so totally full of perfect. There is something about Ms. Millay's stance on despair, love, death, etc. that has always struck me as wonderful. If the Dorothy Parker poetic voice sounds (to me) like the middle of a wine-maudled bender, full of laughter and tears, then the Edna St. Vincent Millay poetic voice sounds like the hard, slightly hungover morning after, staring out through the window with a cup of coffee in your hands. The tears and laughter have both dried up and there's just this intense weight of knowledge and this resignation and this hard eyed honesty that doesn't do anything to make the situation easier. But it makes you stronger.
What I find so deeply, comfortingly moral about Dirge Without Music is that it doesn't offer the reader a single out. The people mourned are dead, and they're going to stay dead. They were (the poem lists their good qualities): beautiful, tender, kind, intelligent, witty, brave. They didn't deserve to die. We are explicitly told that their legacy does not preserve the best of them: "the best is lost." And we're told that this death is inevitable, that no amount of our emotion can stop it. Much as Dylan Thomas's poem is a great one, the advice to "rage, rage, against the dying of the light" doesn't help us here. The light is going to die.
So why do I love this poem? Why do I find it cheering? What possible moral victory is there in the face of a death that takes the best people, robs us of the best of their gifts, and leaves us with dull, indiscriminate dust, with formulas, fragments, and phrases?
It's all in that end line: "I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned."
In a life where death, failure, and loss are inevitable, it is easy to become resigned. Lots of people talk about that like a virtue, "becoming resigned to the inevitable." Other people allow themselves to believe that the inevitable is not inevitable, that we can somehow escape death, or conquer death, or that our legacy compensates for our death.
Edna St. Vincent Millay's poetry spits on that resignation. Her poems tell us that it is cowardly to deny that death is coming, but that it is equally cowardly to let this certain knowledge bow us down. The heroism of life comes in the fact that we have to stare death in the face, acknowledge the certainty of destruction and loss, and then move forward. We are not allowed fatalism. We are not allowed to stop our work, just because all of our work will come to dust. In Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Ozymandias, we're invited to mock the great king who set up all those monuments. After all his work, and his proud boasts to others inviting them to "look on my works, you mighty, and despair," only broken fragments remain in the death.
Millay says we don't mock. She says, we mourn, and then we build again anyway. And again, and again. The responsibility for doing the right thing is never alleviated by the inevitability of failure. And we're not allowed to look away from that failure and build in ignorance. Again and again we must choose to build, despite our certain and continual knowledge of destruction.
Whenever I think on how she wrote stuff like that, I feel stronger and better as a human being.
PS I apologize if the Shelley and Thomas quotes are a bit off - the only poetry book I have actually in front of me is the Millay one.
PPS I love Dorothy Parker's poems a lot. Reading them is like being at a party with a friend. But it is a frantic carnival party, and it is a sad friend, and her boyfriend just left her, and the two of you are knocking back cheap vodka and cheap red wine in equal measure and someone is chain smoking clove cigarettes nearby, and there's both blues and techno on the stereo system. Good poems. Full of insight. But they don't make me feel the spiritual ELATION about the necessity of continuing despite it all that Millay's poems make me feel.
The title: Dirge Without Music.
First two lines:
"I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:"
...
Last line:
"I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned."
*sigh*
This is so totally full of perfect. There is something about Ms. Millay's stance on despair, love, death, etc. that has always struck me as wonderful. If the Dorothy Parker poetic voice sounds (to me) like the middle of a wine-maudled bender, full of laughter and tears, then the Edna St. Vincent Millay poetic voice sounds like the hard, slightly hungover morning after, staring out through the window with a cup of coffee in your hands. The tears and laughter have both dried up and there's just this intense weight of knowledge and this resignation and this hard eyed honesty that doesn't do anything to make the situation easier. But it makes you stronger.
What I find so deeply, comfortingly moral about Dirge Without Music is that it doesn't offer the reader a single out. The people mourned are dead, and they're going to stay dead. They were (the poem lists their good qualities): beautiful, tender, kind, intelligent, witty, brave. They didn't deserve to die. We are explicitly told that their legacy does not preserve the best of them: "the best is lost." And we're told that this death is inevitable, that no amount of our emotion can stop it. Much as Dylan Thomas's poem is a great one, the advice to "rage, rage, against the dying of the light" doesn't help us here. The light is going to die.
So why do I love this poem? Why do I find it cheering? What possible moral victory is there in the face of a death that takes the best people, robs us of the best of their gifts, and leaves us with dull, indiscriminate dust, with formulas, fragments, and phrases?
It's all in that end line: "I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned."
In a life where death, failure, and loss are inevitable, it is easy to become resigned. Lots of people talk about that like a virtue, "becoming resigned to the inevitable." Other people allow themselves to believe that the inevitable is not inevitable, that we can somehow escape death, or conquer death, or that our legacy compensates for our death.
Edna St. Vincent Millay's poetry spits on that resignation. Her poems tell us that it is cowardly to deny that death is coming, but that it is equally cowardly to let this certain knowledge bow us down. The heroism of life comes in the fact that we have to stare death in the face, acknowledge the certainty of destruction and loss, and then move forward. We are not allowed fatalism. We are not allowed to stop our work, just because all of our work will come to dust. In Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Ozymandias, we're invited to mock the great king who set up all those monuments. After all his work, and his proud boasts to others inviting them to "look on my works, you mighty, and despair," only broken fragments remain in the death.
Millay says we don't mock. She says, we mourn, and then we build again anyway. And again, and again. The responsibility for doing the right thing is never alleviated by the inevitability of failure. And we're not allowed to look away from that failure and build in ignorance. Again and again we must choose to build, despite our certain and continual knowledge of destruction.
Whenever I think on how she wrote stuff like that, I feel stronger and better as a human being.
PS I apologize if the Shelley and Thomas quotes are a bit off - the only poetry book I have actually in front of me is the Millay one.
PPS I love Dorothy Parker's poems a lot. Reading them is like being at a party with a friend. But it is a frantic carnival party, and it is a sad friend, and her boyfriend just left her, and the two of you are knocking back cheap vodka and cheap red wine in equal measure and someone is chain smoking clove cigarettes nearby, and there's both blues and techno on the stereo system. Good poems. Full of insight. But they don't make me feel the spiritual ELATION about the necessity of continuing despite it all that Millay's poems make me feel.
