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By ROSS ANDERSON
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Edna St. Vincent Millay’s fourteen-line pentameter repudiation of all lake isles of sentimentality.
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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.
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|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.
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