Prospects: Introducing “Renascence” Revisited
by Mark Raymond
And on some far-off silent day
A thinker gazing on a hill
[. . . .] shall bring back the faded bays,
The Muses to their ancient rule.--Orrick Johns, “Second Avenue” (lines 105-106, 109-110)
Little could the 25-year-old Orrick Johns know, as he celebrated the $500 top prize for his poem “Second Avenue” in 1912’s The Lyric Year, that his imagined “thinker on a hill” was already born, was, in fact, already on her hill, a young woman of twenty, in the act of writing her own “rebirth,” looking ahead to a career that would bring back the muses and their laurels, within a decade hailed in Poetry magazine as the “greatest woman poet since Sappho.”
In time, I’m sure, the irony of it all wouldn’t be lost on Orrick, but, well, 500 bucks is 500 bucks, and maybe in the end “Renascence” turns out to be the more prophetic poem, one that runs away with Orrick’s $500 misprision, precisely because, in its day, it wasn’t allowed to win.
Start with the title. “Renascence” is an uncommon word, rare even in young Vincent’s time. Although the word’s usage does show a bit of a bump, climbing towards the end of the nineteenth century, peaking in the 1930’s, only to sink again in the ‘50’s, it’s always been relatively infrequent. And it’s not an archaic word. It postdates Shakespeare, so, technically (early) “modern” English, and it means what you think it means: rebirth, a synonym for renaissance.
Its usage was already trending upwards when Millay’s “Renascence” appeared, so the poem’s publication can’t be considered the initial driver of the word’s small revival, although the poem’s notoriety surely amplified its use, and, nowadays, with its occurrence flatlined again, it’s the story of Vincent and “Renascence” that keeps the word alive. It’s now her word.
Somewhat uncannily, the span of Millay’s own life more or less tracks the word’s modest rise and fall. This is probably mostly a coincidence, although not completely, for Millay’s poetics shows a surprising knack for anticipating trends, seizing upon existing forms and tropes and perfecting them through revitalization, rebirthing them in a sense. She’s perpetually the poet of renascence, a return to the lyricism of the Sapphic muse, a girl on the hilltop giving birth to a woman, creatively, poetically.
“Renascence” is a prospect poem, at least it starts out that way. Its baseline, its birthplace or point of origin, comes out of a genre often credited with shaping the lyric mode of Romantic poetry: the topographical or locodescriptive poem. There’s a long tradition of poets climbing a hill and talking about what they see, maybe saying something about the history of the place, to which Romanticism adds more about what the poet feels, an enhanced appreciation for the “nature” of the landscape.
Millay gets the bulk of her topography over with in the opening lines. Notice that nothing in the poem ties her description directly to a specific geographical location. We know where we are, on Mt Battie in the Camden Hills on the edge of Maine’s Penobscot Bay, because we know the story of Millay’s life, and we can go up to the top of the hill and orient ourselves to her point of view, recreate her prospect. Even Williams Wordsworth, whose work epitomizes the “greater Romantic lyric,” and who avoided giving the reader the briefest peek at the ruined abbey in the poem we commonly refer to as “Tintern Abbey,” still locates his famous prospect poem precisely (perhaps overly so) through its full title, “Lines: Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.” Somewhat oddly, the only placename in “Renascence” is Capri. Is it odd that a poem that so epitomizes the story of Millay’s life, a story localized biographically and geographically—Maine girl writes big poem—avoids specific places and dates?
From our perspective, Wordsworth and Millay both now claim spots on the literary tourist circuit, and Romanticism’s penchant for linking place, memory, and “powerful feeling” to an individual’s lived experience encourages us to trace biography through landscape and vice versa, something we experience through reading but also experience through visiting the places themselves. I see the Owl and Turtle Bookshop in Camden still lists Millay’s poems as summer bestsellers. Poet and place are linked, biographically, literarily, and commercially.
Millay’s “Renascence”—is it still readable? Can we bear it again? That depends. I probably wouldn’t read it, the whole of it, if I didn’t have a stake in it, as a Millay House Rockland board member, as an academic trained to say something about poetry, maybe even as a kid who grew up in Rockland—should I say I’d finish it off the way Mainers acquire a taste for Moxie, or like those locals in other corners of the globe take pride in lutefisk or haggis? Millay fans will naturally hold a version of the poem in their hearts, and the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry used to include it, but newer editions cast the poem away, although it still figures in the anthology’s biographical note about Millay.
I was assigned the Norton Anthology as a textbook, yet no professor, undergrad or grad school, had us read Millay in classes where you might expect her, surveys of modern poetry, a course on New England poets, for instance. I’ll admit this is at best a broad academic narrative tracing my own experience coming out of the 1980’s and ‘90’s. If I had specialized in American literature or focused on a different time period, I expect one could find vigorous scholarly work on Millay. The point is, neither John Tagliabue nor Harold Bloom bothered to deal with her, at least in the classes I took with them.
The Millay House Rockland can’t ignore “Renascence.” It’s her birthplace as much as the house on Broadway. So the Third Fig Review is revisiting the poem, not like a tourist, but like a person with a stake in Millay, a stake in poetry. Why should the poem matter, for us, today, beyond just its place in Vincent’s life? We’ve asked Maine poets, especially young writers around Millay’s own age when she wrote it, to respond to the poem and judge for themselves its impact on the poetry world, its impact on their own lives in poetry.
Girl on the Hill
So what’s happening to the poem’s speaker on her hilltop? She’s testing her limits, feeling bounded by all she sees, and, in a rather Romantic-inflected way, she pushes the empirical to consider what the imagination can contain. So, as she puts it, “here upon my back I'll lie / And look my fill into the sky.” “Look my fill” appears to be an idiom young Vincent coined herself, and its playfulness belies the risks of a lone consciousness attempting to encompass the infinite and the eternal and all the rest of the big everything she takes on.
Look at how she positions herself, vulnerably on her back (where she’ll spend the next 160 lines of the poem, over three quarters of the text), screaming as “Infinity / Came down and settled over me.” The sky (and all the big things it personifies) “force(s)” and “press(es)” down until “it seemed I must behold / Immensity made manifold.” Bearing in mind that it’s the imaginative agency of Millay herself that puts her in this position (and that the speaker is ungendered throughout the text—the “he” at the end is generalized and distinct from the speaking “I”), the poet on her hilltop recalls a very old trope of humans engaging the divine in high places, the risks of mountaintops and sky gods, with the gendering of the heavens going back to Sinai, back to Ouranos settling over Gaia. Twenty-year-old Millay anticipates a question Yeats would ask a dozen years later in his God-rape sonnet “Leda and the Swan”: “Did she put on his knowledge with his power?” Unlike Yeats’ Leda, the speaker in Millay’s “Renascence” voices her acknowledgement of (and responsibility for) the immense revelation granted her, traumatic though it be:
I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore.
She takes on the knowledge (“looks her fill”) of the Infinite and the Eternal that the sky repeatedly presses and forces upon her.
The speaker’s response, on the one hand “screaming” and defensive (notice how her arm is bent back to her chest), graphicly enacts the fluid and ambiguous expression of agency and vulnerability central to the poem:
The Universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense
That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence
But could not,—nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck
My lips away till I had drawn
All venom out.
Just as Millay’s visionary assault is precipitated by her reaching out (and reaching up), her reaction is first to “probe” but then to “suck,” the “core” of the Universe a great gaping “wound.” Remembering that this is all an expression of the power of her empathic imagination, mounted as an allegory of big concepts, the physicality of her actions is revealing and very much complicates the binaries handed down from Sinai or the traditional orientation of Ouranos to Gaia.
Such radical empathy is a dangerous thing, since it depends on radical vulnerability. The poem’s healing rebirth, however, is not so radical, at least in one sense, for it requires the conventional acceptance of the grace of a higher power. There’s some question about how sincerely we should take Millay’s faithful turn to “God” as key to the poem’s narrative of rebirth, with one commenter suggesting it flirts with being dismissed as a “commercial ploy”—she was cannily writing what she expected her audience to accept.
The poem’s religiosity does speak something about the poet’s age and the age in which she lived. We might be less comfortable evoking God in our contemporary poetry (and Millay herself would be less nominally or conventionally devout as she grew older and her world widened). Taking a cue from Romanticism, today’s readers might feel inclined to substitute the power of God with some other empowering presence, something that connects the individual to everything else, the Infinite and the Eternal. As Hannah Brooks-Motl contends, in her helpful “Poem Guide” to “Renascence” available through the Poetry Foundation, “God might be one word for this intermediate agent, poetry another.”
However, even if, on the one hand, Romanticism prepares for this secularizing shift, Millay’s creative suffering and rebirthing, exposed on her hilltop, recapitulates an even older trope, one going back to Late Antiquity and those desert ascetics who meditated on sin until their vision went black. Acedia, sometimes called the “Noonday Demon,” was a special type of religious despair, a sin in its own right, which originally beset the faithful overly obsessed with the sad state of the world. The way Freud saw melancholia as a sort of a metastasized version of mourning, acedia is like a sickness of “penthos” or compunction, a sympathetic sorrow over human failings which should purify the soul, but which, taken to extremes, threatens to paralyze faith, envisioning a universe hopelessly ruined and sinful.
Acedia never went away. It morphed into the sin of sloth in the Western Europe of the Middle Ages and got revisited by European intellectuals in response to the horrors of the 20th century (and could be having a renascence today, looking at the ways things are going).
I don’t think twenty-year-old Millay was anticipating Walter Benjamin. She didn’t read Greek patristic literature at Camden High. Still, Orrick Johns proves himself the prophet here, since it really is Millay the “thinker gazing on a hill” that imagines the agency of radical empathy. She thinks like a European intellectual coming to grips with the impasse that the old tropes of human history have got us into.
Ironically, it’s Orrick himself whose prospects remain idled as he can’t think himself out of the intellectual rut that is the lane the poetry world offered him, the bright young thing.
Second Avenue
It’s easy to be annoyed with Orrick Johns’ prizewinning poem “Second Avenue.” Not only did the judges elevate it over Millay’s “Renascence,” keeping her out of The Lyric Year money, the poem sets off with some disconcertingly Kiplingesque echoes of “The White Man’s Burden”:
In gutter and on sidewalk swells
The strange, the alien Disarray,
Flung from the Continental hells,
From Eastern dark to Western day.
Here, the “strange, the alien Disarray” is clearly meant to represent European immigrants, “huddled masses” and “wretched refuse” and all that, like in Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet. The story goes Orrick was inspired by the radical Emma Goldman, so the young man was basically as “woke” as you could get for the times. We’re in the peak era of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Jews from Russia, so more huddled and wretched than the earlier waves of assimilated immigrants from Western and Northern Europe, poorer, stranger, more alien. The era’s also marked by heightened discrimination colored by racial anthropology and eugenics, with people from around the Mediterranean and Eastern European occupying a lower tier than the Germanic and Nordic.
When you hear the title, think the Lower East Side, tenements and Jacob Riis. The other half had been living there some time, so nativist versus “other” is an entrenched American dynamic (do I need to make a reference to today?). You might expect a bit of descriptive grit, like something to go alongside the art of the Ash Can School or the Eliotic slumming of “Preludes.” Orrick doesn’t take it to the streets, however. More to the point, the poem has trouble seeing immigrants as fully human, tending to use vague generalizations like “motley multitude,” rarely depicting them as persons and only then when their personhood is partial and biased, through synecdoches like a “thousand thousand feet” or negatively coded epithets like “slave” or “harlot,” and this struggle seems to be part of the argument of the poem
Keep in mind, Orrick was 25 while Millay was just 20. Both young poets can be earnestly overwrought. Johns’ versification and stately diction show real skill, though perhaps not as naturally lyrical and impassioned as the younger Vincent. When you know the tradition he’s writing out of, you can’t help hearing his poem as a cosplay junior-version of Gray’s Elegy, the modulations of its idioms, the balanced sentiments of its periodic beats, it’s a poem of leaden echoes, although its topic must have seemed fresh in his eyes.
Here’s where the poets, Johns and Millay, cross each other. Both were obviously concerned to deal with the issue of Southern and Eastern European immigrants. The topic must have been trending in some way, appealing to young writers making sense of the world and its troubles. The topic draws on empathy and fits a progressive stance common to youthful open-mindedness.
In Millay’s poem, that unique man in Capri (the sole placename in the text) almost certainly represents the plight of Southern Europeans who might be desperate to migrate:
A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
My grandfather passed through Ellis Island in 1912, 19 years old, from a starving village in Greece. Capri to us evokes too much the glamorous wealthy vacation playground. Millay could have used Napoli and still got her rhyme. Still, she sees the individual eye to eye. How much more generous and empathetic is Vincent to this distinct soul than Johns is to the “alien Disarray” on “Second Avenue.”
There’s no “I” persona in Johns’ “Second Avenue.” There’s only the second person “you” and the poetic “ye.” While the speaker of “Renascence” takes everything on herself, her responsibility, her “hunger,” her “sin,” Orrick’s detached voice points the finger at others. He embeds a radicalized argument against capitalism into his poem (Emma Goldman’s doing probably), “For gold you have grown feverish.” Fair enough. But as the “you’s” and the “ye’s” of the poem pile up, it can be confusing whether he’s addressing the oppressor or the oppressed. To some extent, this epitomizes the blind spot in Johns’ argument, something he hasn’t thought enough about. The poem builds towards a hopeful claim that:
You, having brothers in all lands,
Shall teach to all lands brotherhood;
yet it’s unclear who he’s addressing. I suspect he’s calling on Americans to accept their “brother” immigrants, but the “you” could just as easily be the others spoken of a few lines before:
Beat on, ye thousand thousand feet,
Beat on through unreturning ways[.]
That’s a sentiment sure to be divisive in our age of ICE and would probably have risked a xenophobic reaction back in 1912. Problem is, Orrick’s poem remains triumphantly patronizing. He tries to keep his “you’s” and his “ye’s” apart (or doesn’t even consider the immigrants as part of his audience, despite apostrophizing them repeatedly). The immigrants, that “alien Disarray,” remain poetic objects. They function like the other rhetorical devices in his poem, the tropes and allusions, the Muses and the bays. Their humanity becomes inanimate, a figure of diction. They’re not brothers, they’re just heavy, the “White Man’s [the West’s] Burden” all over again.
Millay’s “Renascence” avoids all classical allusion. No “bays” and “Muses” for this prospective Sappho. She looks the man from Capri straight in the eye. I’m sure Orrick Johns’ poem felt like the more politically engaged piece at the time. He wrote in the lane that was given him, and I’m sure he felt invulnerable in his tropes. But in the end, he wrote a $500 poem. Millay created something more universal and timeless, a revelation of radical empathy showing humanity knows no bounds.
Mark Raymond was born in Portland, Maine, and grew up in Rockland and Owls Head. He received his PhD in English Literature from New York University and now teaches for the UMaine Honors College and serves on the Millay House Rockland board.
