Edna St. Vincent Millay titled her lyric “Recuerdo”—Spanish for “memory” or “keepsake”—and the word is a promise: what follows is not a restless night happening in the present but a night kept and polished by remembering. Millay wrote in the early 1920s, when she was the celebrated voice of Greenwich Village bohemia, a young poet whose persona burned with postwar freedom. The poem appeared in her 1923 collection The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems. It belongs to that Jazz Age world of all-night ferry rides, cheap fruit, and a kind of deliberate poverty that felt more like liberty. Millay had already become famous for verses about a candle burning at both ends, and “Recuerdo” extends that spirit into one shared night.
The scene is simple but strange. Two people ride a ferry back and forth until dawn. They are exhausted, yet the repeated line “We were very tired, we were very merry” insists that tiredness and happiness are not opposites. The central idea lives in that balance: joy does not require comfort, and a night of wandering can become its own form of wealth. They eat apples and pears “from a dozen of each we had bought somewhere,” as if the exact market matters less than the shared fruit. Then the sky goes “wan,” the wind comes cold, and the sun rises “dripping, a bucketful of gold.” Dawn arrives not as a soft pastel but as something poured out, almost too bright to hold.
The poem’s three stanzas are built like a folk song or a round. Each opens with the same couplet about the ferry, and the rhyme falls into quick, obvious pairs: “stable” with “table,” “pear” with “somewhere,” “head” with “read.” That insistent chime gives the lines a back-and-forth rhythm, like the ferry itself traveling the same water over and over. The repeated “and” in the second stanza piles clause on clause, as if the night’s wonders arrive faster than the speaker can sort them. The imagery is physical and slightly off-balance. The ferry is “bare and bright, and smelled like a stable,” mixing a visual with an animal smell. A woman they meet appears not as a face but as “a shawl-covered head,” a detail that makes her need concrete without turning her into a symbol. The morning paper they buy but “neither of us read” is a perfect small joke about living inside an experience rather than turning to the world outside.
The most memorable turn comes at the end. The travelers greet the woman with “Good morrow, mother!,” give her the apples and pears, and then give her “all our money but our subway fares.” That last phrase is essential: they keep only what will move them forward, enough to ride home, while everything else becomes a gift. In a poem full of gold, the real gold is not the sunrise but the ability to let money go. The words “tired” and “merry” keep returning because the night is both worn and radiant, and the title “Recuerdo” turns the whole experience into a keepsake. The speaker is not offering a moral; she is remembering how it felt to have almost nothing and still feel rich enough to give nearly everything away.
Millay’s poem remains significant because it captures a distinctly modern kind of freedom. The speaker is a woman out all night, riding public transit, eating fruit with someone she loves, giving money to a stranger, and the poem never treats that behavior as scandalous—it treats it as beautiful. The loose, songlike couplets make that freedom feel catchy rather than solemn, and the repeated refrain makes the night seem as if it could go on forever, back and forth, tired and merry, until the sun rises like a bucketful of gold.