Mariposa

        Butterflies are white and blue
        In this field we wander through.
        Suffer me to take your hand.
        Death comes in a day or two.

        All the things we ever knew
        Will be ashes in that hour,
        Mark the transient butterfly,
        How he hangs upon the flower.

        Suffer me to take your hand.
        Suffer me to cherish you
        Till the dawn is in the sky.
        Whether I be false or true,
        Death comes in a day or two.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

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Edna St. Vincent Millay

When The Year Grows Old

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Simple Poetry

Recuerdo

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Simple Poetry

Exiled

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Simple Poetry

Elegy Before Death

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Simple Poetry

English

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Sonnets VIII

        And you as well must die, beloved dust,
        And all your beauty stand you in no stead;
        This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
        This body of flame and steel, before the gust
        Of Death, or under his autumnal frost,
        Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead
        Than the first leaf that fell,--this wonder fled.
        Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.
        Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.
        In spite of all my love, you will arise
        Upon that day and wander down the air
        Obscurely as the unattended flower,
        It mattering not how beautiful you were,
        Or how beloved above all else that dies.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Passer Mortuus Est

        Death devours all lovely things;
            Lesbia with her sparrow
        Shares the darkness,--presently
            Every bed is narrow.

        Unremembered as old rain
            Dries the sheer libation,
        And the little petulant hand
            Is an annotation.

        After all, my erstwhile dear,
            My no longer cherished,
        Need we say it was not love,
            Now that love is perished?

Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Butterfly's Day.

From cocoon forth a butterfly
As lady from her door
Emerged -- a summer afternoon --
Repairing everywhere,

Without design, that I could trace,
Except to stray abroad
On miscellaneous enterprise
The clovers understood.

Her pretty parasol was seen
Contracting in a field
Where men made hay, then struggling hard
With an opposing cloud,

Where parties, phantom as herself,
To Nowhere seemed to go
In purposeless circumference,
As 't were a tropic show.

And notwithstanding bee that worked,
And flower that zealous blew,
This audience of idleness
Disdained them, from the sky,

Till sundown crept, a steady tide,
And men that made the hay,
And afternoon, and butterfly,
Extinguished in its sea.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

The Poet And His Book

        Down, you mongrel, Death!
            Back into your kennel!
        I have stolen breath
            In a stalk of fennel!
        You shall scratch and you shall whine
            Many a night, and you shall worry
            Many a bone, before you bury
        One sweet bone of mine!

        When shall I be dead?
            When my flesh is withered,
        And above my head
            Yellow pollen gathered
        All the empty afternoon?
            When sweet lovers pause and wonder
            Who am I that lie thereunder,
        Hidden from the moon?

        This my personal death?--
            That lungs be failing
        To inhale the breath
            Others are exhaling?
        This my subtle spirit...

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Elegy Before Death

        There will be rose and rhododendron
            When you are dead and under ground;
        Still will be heard from white syringas
            Heavy with bees, a sunny sound;

        Still will the tamaracks be raining
            After the rain has ceased, and still
        Will there be robins in the stubble,
            Brown sheep upon the warm green hill.

        Spring will not ail nor autumn falter;
            Nothing will know that you are gone,
        Saving alone some sullen plough-land
            None but yourself sets foot upon;

        Saving the may-weed and the pig-weed
            Nothing will know that you are dead,--
        These, and perhaps a useless wagon
            Standing beside some tumbled shed.

 ...

Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Death Of Autumn

        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?

Edna St. Vincent Millay