“Renascence” Reheard: Millay’s Resonance
by Ellen M. Taylor
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1912 “Renascence” reads as one might expect from a poem written at the tail of the long 19th century, with Big Ideas like Infinity and Eternity, images of sepulchres, souls, and Thy Heart! With its predictable rhyming couplets and pulsing iambic tetrameters, the poem feels dated by today’s standards. While we cannot judge a poem’s form and tone by contemporary measures, it’s interesting to consider what ideas remain relevant to our more modern sensibilities.
Written when Millay was just 20, “Renascence” failed to earn any prize money in the contest where she sent it. The poem did, however, launch her literary career. Prompted by her sister, Norma, Vincent read her poem to a rapt audience at Whitehall Inn in Camden. There, hotel guest Caroline Dow was so impressed she offered to fund Vincent’s tuition at Vassar. This example solidifies what we know about the power of the spoken word. Giving a poem a voice, breath, cadence, volume, and emphasis, is an entirely different experience than meeting that poem on a page. The relative renaissance of spoken word events is a testimony to the pleasure of performance and communal experiences.
Yet as a poet who teaches poetry, both as literature and as a creative endeavor, I find Millay’s form on the page worth parsing. The poem’s oft quoted opening stanza (reprinted in part on the walls of the public library in Camden, Maine) sets up the AA BB CC DD rhyme and tetrameter:
All I could see from where I stood
was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked the other way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
The stanza introduces a circular pattern that reoccurs throughout much of the poem, where the opening lines are repeated at the stanza’s end: “All I could see from where I stood / Was three long mountains and a wood.” Moreover, the key image of seeing opens the next stanza, “Over these things I could not see” (11). This looping back occurs throughout, though not always—enough to be remarkable but not predictable, e.g. “I screamed, to feel it touch the sky / I screamed, and - lo! - Infinity.”
The journey of the speaker from observation to wonder, burial to transcendence, rebirth to gratitude, happens over the course of 20 stanzas of unequal length and regular meter. This mixture of fixed form (rhyme and meter) and holistic reckoning illustrates the literary traditions of Millay’s youth and offers a prediction of what is yet to come in poetic forms.
A lasting sentiment of “Renascence” is a state of wonder and astonishment at, and appreciation of, our natural world. With our modern apprehension and anxieties regarding climate change, extinction of song birds and wild animals, rising sea water and temperatures, a gift of this poem is the reminder that we can still lay on a rock and stretch out our arms to discover “The world stands out on either side / No wider than the heart is wide.” The horizon is a perception; our infinite capacity for wonder and gratitude is boundless.
When shared with adult university students in a recent summer school class, one response was exuberant: “‘Renascence’ is the best poem I have ever read” writes Jon McKenney, “it’s a young girl’s wistful imaginings or a sci-fi fable, passing through a water glass when I realized that I was in the middle of a short story, and looking forward to what happens next.” The poem’s cycles can be read as both prophetic and portentous.
As such, it may be a choice poem to teach and showcase one of Maine’s literary superstars. Students may be astounded to imagine that Millay would read to sold out crowds measuring in the thousands, including a rowdy bunch at Vassar where the performance had to be relocated to the students’ building to accommodate her fans. Beyond her literary stardom and her accomplishments as a writer of sonnets and ballads, she was also on the cusp of modernism, a feminist, a lover of men and women, and a cultural icon. In these times of waning appreciation for powerful women who know their own hearts and minds, we might hold up Vincent as a model to live large and full, as “he whose soul is flat - the sky / Will cave in on him by and by.”
Ellen M. Taylor is a poet and professor of English at the University of Maine at Augusta. She has published three collections of poetry, and scholarship on poets Celia Thaxter, Elizabeth Coatsworth, and Kate Barnes. Taylor chairs the annual Plunkett Maine Poetry Festival, and the Writers in the Round conference each September on Star Island. She lives with her family in Appleton, Maine.
