Poem of the Day: ‘The Death of Autumn’

In 1921, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) published “Second April,” her third book of poetry — and demonstrated what careful readers had suspected for some while: This was a poet completely in command of her craft. The 1917 “Renascence: and other poems” and the 1920 “A Few Figs From Thistles” owed at least some of their popularity to the cultivated image of the author’s narrative voice: a wild child, a deep-seer, a mystical visionary of beauty, and a young woman wandering the universe. “Second April” showed that she was, at root, a poet dedicated to craft: the perfect sonnets, the nuanced weights of syllables as she varied her meters, the metaphors and images with which she worked. Even the simple rhymes, using rhyme not for show but for purpose. In “The Death of Autumn” she writes 11 lines of pentameter to paint a picture of fall at its bleakest. We know, in some abstract way, that the year will be reborn after winter, but what power does that knowledge have to ease the heart that sees only the death of summer? “Oh, Autumn! Autumn! — What is the Spring to me?”