Poem of the Day: ‘I Shall Go Back Again to the Bleak Shore’

This week’s Poem of the Day feature opened, on Monday, with William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” — a poem that Yeats reportedly became tired of reciting. It’s easy to imagine his being tempted to write some poetic rejoinder, perhaps in the style of Gelett Burgess, who similarly sickened of his famous quatrain about a purple cow. If we don’t have Yeats’s rebuttal to his most popular poem, we do have a counterpart from Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), whose February 22 birthday came this week. In the early 1920s, Millay was writing at the top of her form. Her 1922 book, “The Harp-Weaver,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, still seems like a Greatest Hits album, including her famously biting sonnet “I, Being Born a Woman,” as well as today’s poem, a fourteen-line pentameter repudiation of all lake isles of sentimentality. “I Shall Go Back Again to the Bleak Shore,” a Petrarchan sonnet, picks up the theme of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” but with a difference. On Millay’s island of memory there are no beehives, no linnet’s wings, no peace dropping slow. There are only the sand and seaweed of disillusionment, the barren landscape of reality: all that’s left when the bright, false curtain of love is torn away. I Shall Go Back Again to the Bleak Shore by Edna St. Vincent Millay I shall go back again to the bleak shore And build a little shanty on the sand, In such a way that the extremest band Of brittle seaweed will escape my door But by a yard or two; and nevermore Shall I return to take you by the hand; I shall be gone to what I understand, And happier than I ever was before. The love that stood a moment in your eyes, The words that lay a moment on your tongue, Are one with all that in a moment dies, A little under-said and over-sung. But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies Unchanged from what they were when I was young. ___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘I Shall Go Back Again to the Bleak Shore’

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