/// I Shall Forget You Presently, My Dear Edna St. Vincent Millay
I shall forget you presently, my dear, So make the most of this, your little day, Your little month, your little half a year, Ere I forget, or die, or move away, And we are done forever; by and by I shall forget you, as I said, but now, If you entreat me with your loveliest lie I will protest you with my favorite vow. I would indeed that love were longer-lived, And oaths were not so brittle as they are, But so it is, and nature has contrived To stuggle on without a break thus far,— Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking.
A pity, really, that Millay so quickly fell into relative obscurity after her early death. Her poetry was in North American school anthologies into the 60s and 70s but by then was rigorously ignored despite -- or perhaps because of -- its accessibility. One thinks of her in the same category as the almost forgotten Fireside Poets of a couple of generations previous -- Longfellow, Bryant, Holmes et al. Of course nowadays poetry of any kind rarely makes it onto school reading lists (I doubt any of my children ever encountered a single one in school) and one wonders if perhaps there is a connection.
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Comments
Nice.
A pity, really, that Millay so quickly fell into relative obscurity after her early death. Her poetry was in North American school anthologies into the 60s and 70s but by then was rigorously ignored despite -- or perhaps because of -- its accessibility. One thinks of her in the same category as the almost forgotten Fireside Poets of a couple of generations previous -- Longfellow, Bryant, Holmes et al. Of course nowadays poetry of any kind rarely makes it onto school reading lists (I doubt any of my children ever encountered a single one in school) and one wonders if perhaps there is a connection.
Posted by: Mac | Jan 8, 2009 10:17:20 PM
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