March 2022
Author's Note: The sonnet below is intended as a tribute to Edna St Vincent Millay (1898 – 1950), and it’s also a reflection on what she might have had to say if she could pick up a pen again in 2022, a full century after those notorious (but carefully expurgated) twenties that encompassed her own. I’ve always been a devoted fan of hers, but I sometimes worry that she was admired in those days for all the wrong reasons.
Latter-day Letter to ESVM
Edna St. Vincent Millay enjoyed the status of a best-selling poet in the 1920s,
when her slim volumes could be found in every genteel home in the nation.
—Ernest Hilbert
Listen, Vincent. If I’d known you, if
I’d been your friend, here’s what I would have said
to you: get up. Kick that stranger out of bed,
and try to keep your clothes on long enough
to find a pen. Then write a line of verse
that wraps the adolescent century
in a feather boa—not the corsetry
of lofty lexicology—or (worse)
the virginal vernacular of swoon.
Dazzle us. Tell us how it must have been
to flicker through the past as libertine,
rippling with sequins, sonnets, saxophones.
Ah, the streets you could have danced us through—
Gifted practitioner, why didn’t you?
©2022 Marilyn Taylor
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