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Edna Millay

selected poems

Love is Not All (Sonnet XXX)
Love is not all:
it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof
against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar
to men that sink
And rise and sink
and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung
with breath,
Nor clean the blood,
nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends
with death
Even as I speak,
for lack of love alone.
It well may be that
in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain
and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past
resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love
for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night
for food.
It well may be.
I do not think I would.

Elegy Before Death
There will be rose and rhododendron
When you are dead and under ground;
Still will be heard from white syringas
Heavy with bees, a sunny sound;
Still will the tamaracks be raining
After the rain has ceased, and still
Will there be robins in the stubble,
Brown sheep upon the warm green hill.
Spring will not ail nor autumn falter;
Nothing will know that you are gone,
Saving alone some sullen plough-land
None but yourself sets foot upon;
Saving the may-weed and the pig-weed
Nothing will know that you are dead,—
These, and perhaps a useless wagon
Standing beside some tumbled shed.
Oh, there will pass with your great passing
Little of beauty not your own,—
Only the light from common water,
Only the grace from simple stone!

Ashes of Life
Love has gone and left me
and the days are all alike;
Eat I must, and sleep I will,
— and would that night were here!
But ah! — to lie awake and hear
the slow hours strike!
Would that it were day again!
— with twilight near!
Love has gone and left me
and I don't know what to do;
This or that or what you will
is all the same to me;
But all the things that I begin
I leave before I'm through, —
There's little use in anything
as far as I can see.
Love has gone and left me,
— and the neighbors knock and borrow,
And life goes on forever
like the gnawing of a mouse, —
And to-morrow and to-morrow
and to-morrow and to-morrow
There's this little street
and this little house.

Afternoon On A Hill
I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
And the grass rise.
And when lights begin to show
Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
And then start down!