Edna's Sonnet 9

One of my intentions this year is to expand my knowledge of poetry: John Donne, William Shakepeare, John Milton and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are 4 of my favorites and some of the few whose entire body of work is familiar to me.  I am seeking to branch out in terms of style and form (I am unintentionally partial to sonnets!) and era (3 of my 4 are early 17th century contemporaries), and I hope to do a bit of formal study on interpretation and form in modern poetry.  We'll see how far that actually goes!  (notice the very non-committal language of "intention" and "hope"...which allows this NOT to qualify as a NYResolution...which means I can do it or not as I feel led.  Right?  Right.)

In the meantime, I have spent the last few days reading a large portion of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poems.  She was a 20th century, controversial, feminist figure who had no qualms about rebelling openly against the mores of her day...in her poetry, in her plays, in her rhetoric and in her lifestyle. 

But as is so often (perhaps always?)  the case, even though she actively suppressed the image of God in herself, His reflection is still evident in her work.  Not in her expressions of rebellion, of course, but in the conveyance of relationship, beauty, nature and humanity.  I will probably share a number of her poems throughout the year.  (Btw, I will continue to promote poems of my Fabulous Four as well!  I can't resist...)

Sonnet 9
by: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Here is a wound that never will heal, I know,
Being wrought not of a dearness and a death,
But of a love turned ashes and the breath
Gone out of beauty; never again will grow
The grass on that scarred acre, though I sow
Young seed there yearly and the sky bequeath
Its friendly weathers down, far underneath
Shall be such bitterness of an old woe.
That April should be shattered by a gust,
That August should be levelled by a rain,
I can endure, and that the lifted dust
Of man should settle to the earth again;
But that a dream can die, will be a thrust
Between my ribs forever of hot pain.