Most read ▸
Edna St. Vincent Millay
When reeds are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes,
And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind
Like aged warriors westward, tragic, thinned
Of half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes,
Stripped of its secret, open, stark and bleak,
Blackens afar the half-forgotten creek,--
Then leans on me the weight of the year, and crushes
My heart. I know that Beauty must ail and die,
And will be born again,--but ah, to see
Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky!
Oh, Autumn! Autumn!--What is the Spring to me?
In the brown water,
Thick and silver-sheened in the sunshine,
Liquid and cool in the shade of the reeds,
A pike dozed.
Lost among the shadows of stems
He lay unnoticed.
Suddenly he flicked his tail,
And a green-and-copper brightness
Ran under the water.
Out from under the reeds
Came the olive-green light,
And orange flashed up
Through the sun-thickened water.
So the fish passed across the pool,
Green and copper,
A darkness and a gleam,
In the morning light a line
Stretches forever. There my unlived life
Rises, and I resist,
Clinging to the steps of the throne.
Day lifts the darkness from the hills,
A bright blade cuts the reeds,
And my life, pitilessly demanding,
Rises forever in the morning light.
rainy day—
a rough reed touching
all the wind
a reed is nothing
in the world of a mole
but the pain of the stone
makes bloody water
The tide went from ship to ship
like a captain at the tavern
calling at a room
where there was infinite cake—
water in the reeds,
a voyage into some bed.
Night welling up
at noon, I walk west
and hear a poor,
dry sermon
in a reed.
I walk home
to see who might
hang himself.
We sat drinking
of a great udder,
where we observed
the several
engines at work:
one round thing
going with a pair
of stairs round,
round as a reed
that cried to see
a mother where
we drank.
I fetch a friend to send to sea
and see a reed reckoning
the profits of drink.
How much to expect of vice?
I found all my desire
quite spoiled by reason.
I found myself out
of order and cold
like a boat in the trees,
silver and ancient.
I ought to fall
towards the shore, landing
somewhere among the reeds
like a clear fruit of water.
Thin things:
lace in a shoe,
a noon appointment,
a poor-house robe,
a reed
and the road I still
hanker after.
white plumed reeds
above yerba buena
-a clear dry smell
but
the fact of Nature
so complexly given
i was no more of it
than you, a
swift mindless carrier beyond
beyond that one
so perfectly real
in wanting, and
no thought then
seemed deeper
white plumed
sea reeds