Dead Music—An Elegy

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

LET them bury your big eyes In the secret earth securely,

Your thin fingers, and your fair, Soft, indefinite-colored hair,—

All of these in some way, surely, From the secret earth shall rise;

Not for these I sit and stare,

Broken and bereft completely;

Your young flesh that sat so neatly On your little bones will sweetly Blossom in the air.

But your voice,—never the rushing Of a river underground,

Not the rising of the wind In the trees before the rain,

Not the woodcock's watery call,

Not the note the white-throat utters, Not the feet of children pushing Yellow leaves along the gutters In the blue and bitter fall,

Shall content my musing mind For the beauty of that sound That in no new way at all Ever will he heard again.

Sweetly through the sappy stalk Of the vigorous weed,

Holding all it held before, Cherished by the faithful sun,

On and on eternally Shall your altered fluid run,

Bud and bloom and go to seed, But your singing days are done; But the music of your talk Never shall the chemistry Of the secret earth restore.

All your lovely words are spoken. Once the ivory box is broken.

Beats the golden bird no more.

Edna St. Vincent Millay is one of the most distinctive personalities in modern American poetry. She is essentially a classicist, though with a sharpness and emotional force which make much of the poetry done in more novel forms seem ugly and loose, beside her measured stanzas. In her new book, soon to be published by Mitchell Kennerley, she will be seen to have made an extraordinary advance in intensity and form over her first volume, "Renascence". Her one-act play, "Aria da Capo", recently done in New York by the Provincetown Players, is soon to be produced in England and is being translated into Russian.