“A brooding mist from out the marshlands lay / Like age’s clammy hand upon the day, / Soddening it”

[larryhammer]

I've been reading, in those spare moments when I have time for myself, the sonnets of Millay -- which for some reason are helpfully split out from the rest of her poems in her Collected Poetry. Here's one for Poetry Monday:


“Still will I harvest beauty where it grows,” Edna St. V. Millay

Still will I harvest beauty where it grows:
In coloured fungus and the spotted fog
Surprised on foods forgotten; in ditch and bog
Filmed brilliant with irregular rainbows
Of rust and oil, where half a city throws
Its empty tins; and in some spongy log
Whence headlong leaps the oozy emerald frog. . . .
And a black pupil in the green scum shows.
Her the inhabiter of divers places
Surmising at all doors, I push them all.
Oh, you that fearful of a creaking hinge
Turn back forevermore with craven faces,
I tell you Beauty bears an ultra fringe
Unguessed of you upon her gossamer shawl!

---L.


Subject quote from Death As the Teacher of Love-Lore, Frank T. Marzials.