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IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE. _Title:_ Fatal Interview _Date of first publication:_ 1931 _Author:_ Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) _Date first posted:_ June 24, 2020 _Date last updated:_ June 24, 2020 Faded Page eBook #20200622 This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, Cindy Beyer & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net [Cover Illustration] Fatal Interview _Sonnets_ BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY [Illustration] HARPER & BROTHERS _Publishers_ New York _and_ London MCMXXXI FATAL INTERVIEW _Copyright, 1931, by Edna St. Vincent Millay_ _Printed in the U. S. A._ TWELFTH PRINTING G-F OTHER BOOKS BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY ———— THE LAMP AND THE BELL SECOND APRIL THREE PLAYS RENASCENCE A FEW FIGS FROM THISTLES THE HARP-WEAVER ARIA DA CAPO THE KING’S HENCHMAN THE BUCK IN THE SNOW ———— _Harper & Brothers_ _Publishers_ TO ELINOR WYLIE _When I think of you,_ _I die, too._ _In my throat, bereft_ _Like yours, of air,_ _No sound is left,_ _Nothing is there_ _To make a word of grief._ C O N T E N T S What thing is this that, built of salt and lime 1 This beast that rends me in the sight of all 2 No lack of counsel from the shrewd and wise 3 Nay, learnèd doctor, these fine leeches fresh 4 Of all that ever in extreme disease 5 Since I cannot persuade you from this mood 6 Night is my sister, and how deep in love 7 Yet in an hour to come, disdainful dust 8 When you are dead, and your disturbing eyes 9 Strange thing that I, by nature nothing prone 10 Not in a silver casket cool with pearls 11 Olympian gods, mark now my bedside lamp 12 I said, seeing how the winter gale increased 13 Since of no creature living the last breath 14 My worship from this hour the Sparrow-Drawn 15 I dreamed I moved among the Elysian fields 16 Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart 17 Shall I be prisoner till my pulses stop 18 My most distinguished guest and learnèd friend, 19 Think not, nor for a moment let your mind 20 Gone in good sooth you are: not even in dream 21 Now by this moon, before this moon shall wane 22 I know the face of Falsehood and her tongue 23 Whereas at morning in a jeweled crown 24 Peril upon the paths of this desire 25 Women have loved before as I love now 26 Moon, that against the lintel of the west 27 When we are old and these rejoicing veins 28 Heart, have no pity on this house of bone 29 Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink 30 When we that wore the myrtle wear the dust 31 Time, that is pleased to lengthen out the day 32 Sorrowful dreams remembered after waking 33 Most wicked words, forbear to speak them out 34 Clearly my ruined garden as it stood 35 Hearing your words, and not a word among them 36 Believe, if ever the bridges of this town 37 You say: “Since life is cruel enough at best” 38 Love me no more, now let the god depart 39 You loved me not at all, but let it go 40 I said in the beginning, did I not 41 O ailing Love, compose your struggling wing 42 Summer, be seen no more within this wood 43 If to be left were to be left alone 44 I know my mind and I have made my choice 45 Even in the moment of our earliest kiss 46 Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly 47 Now by the path I climbed, I journey back 48 There is a well into whose bottomless eye 49 The heart once broken is a heart no more 50 If in the years to come you should recall 51 Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave 52 F A T A L I N T E R V I E W I WHAT thing is this that, built of salt and lime And such dry motes as in the sunbeam show, Has power upon me that do daily climb The dustless air?—for whom those peaks of snow Whereup the lungs of man with borrowed breath Go labouring to a doom I may not feel, Are but a pearled and roseate plain beneath My wingèd helmet and my wingèd heel. What sweet emotions neither foe nor friend Are these that clog my flight? what thing is this That hastening headlong to a dusty end Dare turn upon me these proud eyes of bliss? Up, up, my feathers!—ere I lay you by To journey barefoot with a mortal joy. II THIS beast that rends me in the sight of all, This love, this longing, this oblivious thing, That has me under as the last leaves fall, Will glut, will sicken, will be gone by spring. The wound will heal, the fever will abate, The knotted hurt will slacken in the breast; I shall forget before the flickers mate Your look that is today my east and west. Unscathed, however, from a claw so deep Though I should love again I shall not go: Along my body, waking while I sleep, Sharp to the kiss, cold to the hand as snow, The scar of this encounter like a sword Will lie between me and my troubled lord. III NO LACK of counsel from the shrewd and wise How love may be acquired and how conserved Warrants this laying bare before your eyes My needle to your north abruptly swerved; If I would hold you, I must hide my fears Lest you be wanton, lead you to believe My compass to another quarter veers, Little surrender, lavishly receive. But being like my mother the brown earth Fervent and full of gifts and free from guile, Liefer would I you loved me for my worth, Though you should love me but a little while, Than for a philtre any doll can brew,— Though thus I bound you as I long to do. IV NAY, learnèd doctor, these fine leeches fresh From the pond’s edge my cause cannot remove: Alas, the sick disorder in my flesh Is deeper than your skill, is very love. And you, good friar, far liefer would I think Upon my dear, and dream him in your place, Than heed your _ben’cites_ and heavenward sink With empty heart and noddle full of grace. Breathes but one mortal on the teeming globe Could minister to my soul’s or body’s needs— Physician minus physic, minus robe; Confessor minus Latin, minus beads. Yet should you bid me name him, I am dumb; For though you summon him, he would not come. V OF ALL that ever in extreme disease “Sweet Love, sweet cruel Love, have pity!” cried, Count me the humblest, hold me least of these That wear the red heart crumpled in the side, In heaviest durance, dreaming or awake, Filling the dungeon with their piteous woe; Not that I shriek not till the dungeon shake, “Oh, God! Oh, let me out! Oh, let me go!” But that my chains throughout their iron length Make such a golden clank upon my ear, But that I would not, boasted I the strength, Up with a terrible arm and out of here Where thrusts my morsel daily through the bars This tall, oblivious gaoler eyed with stars. VI SINCE I cannot persuade you from this mood Of pale preoccupation with the dead, Not for my comfort nor for your own good Shift your concern to living bones instead; Since that which Helen did and ended Troy Is more than I can do though I be warm, Have up your buried girls, egregious boy, And stand with them against the unburied storm. When you lie wasted and your blood runs thin, And what’s to do must with dispatch be done, Call Cressid, call Elaine, call Isolt in!— More bland the ichor of a ghost should run Along your dubious veins than the rude sea Of passion pounding all day long in me. VII NIGHT is my sister, and how deep in love, How drowned in love and weedily washed ashore, There to be fretted by the drag and shove At the tide’s edge, I lie—these things and more: Whose arm alone between me and the sand, Whose voice alone, whose pitiful breath brought near, Could thaw these nostrils and unlock this hand, She could advise you, should you care to hear. Small chance, however, in a storm so black, A man will leave his friendly fire and snug For a drowned woman’s sake, and bring her back To drip and scatter shells upon the rug. No one but Night, with tears on her dark face, Watches beside me in this windy place. VIII YET in an hour to come, disdainful dust, You shall be bowed and brought to bed with me. While the blood roars, or when the blood is rust About a broken engine, this shall be. If not today, then later; if not here On the green grass, with sighing and delight, Then under it, all in good time, my dear, We shall be laid together in the night. And ruder and more violent, be assured, Than the desirous body’s heat and sweat That shameful kiss by more than night obscured Wherewith at length the scornfullest mouth is met. Life has no friend; her converts late or soon Slide back to feed the dragon with the moon. IX WHEN you are dead, and your disturbing eyes No more as now their stormy lashes lift To lance me through—as in the morning skies One moment, plainly visible in a rift Of cloud, two splendid planets may appear And purely blaze, and are at once withdrawn, What time the watcher in desire and fear Leans from his chilly window in the dawn— Shall I be free, shall I be once again As others are, and count your loss no care? Oh, never more, till my dissolving brain Be powerless to evoke you out of air, Remembered morning stars, more fiercely bright Than all the Alphas of the actual night! X STRANGE thing that I, by nature nothing prone To fret the summer blossom on its stem, Who know the hidden nest, but leave alone The magic eggs, the bird that cuddles them, Should have no peace till your bewildered heart Hung fluttering at the window of my breast, Till I had ravished to my bitter smart Your kiss from the stern moment, could not rest. “Swift wing, sweet blossom, live again in air! Depart, poor flower; poor feathers you are free!” Thus do I cry, being teased by shame and care That beauty should be brought to terms by me; Yet shamed the more that in my heart I know, Cry as I may, I could not let you go. XI NOT in a silver casket cool with pearls Or rich with red corundum or with blue, Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls Have given their loves, I give my love to you; Not in a lovers’-knot, not in a ring Worked in such fashion, and the legend plain— _Semper fidelis_, where a secret spring Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain: Love in the open hand, no thing but that, Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt, As one should bring you cowslips in a hat Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt, I bring you, calling out as children do: “Look what I have!—And these are all for you.” XII OLYMPIAN gods, mark now my bedside lamp Blown out; and be advised too late that he Whom you call sire is stolen into the camp Of warring Earth, and lies abed with me. Call out your golden hordes, the harm is done: Enraptured in his great embrace I lie; Shake heaven with spears, but I shall bear a son Branded with godhead, heel and brow and thigh. Whom think not to bedazzle or confound With meteoric splendours or display Of blackened moons or suns or the big sound Of sudden thunder on a silent day; Pain and compassion shall he know, being mine,— Confusion never, that is half divine. XIII I SAID, seeing how the winter gale increased, Even as waxed within us and grew strong The ancient tempest of desire, “At least, It is the season when the nights are long. Well flown, well shattered from the summer hedge The early sparrow and the opening flowers!— Late climbs the sun above the southerly edge These days, and sweet to love those added hours.” Alas, already does the dark recede, And visible are the trees against the snow. Oh, monstrous parting, oh, perfidious deed, How shall I leave your side, how shall I go? . . . Unnatural night, the shortest of the year, Farewell! ’Tis dawn. The longest day is here. XIV SINCE of no creature living the last breath Is twice required, or twice the ultimate pain, Seeing how to quit your arms is very death, ’Tis likely that I shall not die again; And likely ’tis that Time whose gross decree Sends now the dawn to clamour at our door, Thus having done his evil worst to me, Will thrust me by, will harry me no more. When you are corn and roses and at rest I shall endure, a dense and sanguine ghost, To haunt the scene where I was happiest, To bend above the thing I loved the most; And rise, and wring my hands, and steal away As I do now, before the advancing day. XV MY WORSHIP from this hour the Sparrow-Drawn Alone will cherish, and her arrowy child, Whose groves alone in the inquiring dawn Rise tranquil, and their altars undefiled. Seaward and shoreward smokes a plundered land To guard whose portals was my dear employ; Razed are its temples now; inviolate stand Only the slopes of Venus and her boy. How have I stripped me of immortal aid Save theirs alone,—who could endure to see Forsworn Aeneas with conspiring blade Sever the ship from shore (alas for me) And make no sign; who saw, and did not speak, The brooch of Troilus pinned upon the Greek. XVI I DREAMED I moved among the Elysian fields, In converse with sweet women long since dead; And out of blossoms which that meadow yields I wove a garland for your living head. Danae, that was the vessel for a day Of golden Jove, I saw, and at her side, Whom Jove the Bull desired and bore away, Europa stood, and the Swan’s featherless bride. All these were mortal women, yet all these Above the ground had had a god for guest; Freely I walked beside them and at ease, Addressing them, by them again addressed, And marvelled nothing, for remembering you, Wherefore I was among them well I knew. XVII SWEET love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart I took your thrust, whereby I since am slain, And lie disheveled in the grass apart, A sodden thing bedrenched by tears and rain, While rainy evening drips to misty night, And misty night to cloudy morning clears, And clouds disperse across the gathering light, And birds grow noisy, and the sun appears— Had I bethought me then, sweet love, sweet thorn, How sharp an anguish even at the best— When all’s requited and the future sworn— The happy hour can leave within the breast, I had not so come running at the call Of one who loves me little, if at all. XVIII SHALL I be prisoner till my pulses stop To hateful Love and drag his noisy chain, And bait my need with sugared crusts that drop From jeweled fingers neither kind nor clean?— Mewed in an airless cavern where a toad Would grieve to snap his gnat and lay him down, While in the light along the rattling road Men shout and chaff and drive their wares to town? . . . Perfidious Prince, that keep me here confined, Doubt not I know the letters of my doom: How many a man has left his blood behind To buy his exit from this mournful room These evil stains record, these walls that rise Carved with his torment, steamy with his sighs. XIX MY MOST distinguished guest and learnèd friend, the pallid hare that runs before the day Having brought your earnest counsels to an end Now have I somewhat of my own to say: That it is folly to be sunk in love, And madness plain to make the matter known, These are no mysteries you are verger of; Everyman’s wisdoms these are, and my own. If I have flung my heart unto a hound I have done ill, it is a certain thing; Yet breathe I freer, walk I the more sound On my sick bones for this brave reasoning? Soon must I say, “’Tis prowling Death I hear!”— Yet come no better off, for my quick ear. XX THINK not, nor for a moment let your mind, Wearied with thinking, doze upon the thought That the work’s done and the long day behind, And beauty, since ’tis paid for, can be bought. If in the moonlight from the silent bough Suddenly with precision speak your name The nightingale, be not assured that now His wing is limed and his wild virtue tame. Beauty beyond all feathers that have flown Is free; you shall not hood her to your wrist, Nor sting her eyes, nor have her for your own In any fashion; beauty billed and kissed Is not your turtle; tread her like a dove— She loves you not; she never heard of love. XXI GONE in good sooth you are: not even in dream You come. As if the strictures of the light, Laid on our glances to their disesteem, Extended even to shadows and the night; Extended even beyond that drowsy sill Along whose galleries open to the skies All maskers move unchallenged and at will, Visor in hand or hooded to the eyes. To that pavilion the green sea in flood Curves in, and the slow dancers dance in foam; I find again the pink camellia-bud On the wide step, beside a silver comb. . . . But it is scentless; up the marble stair I mount with pain, knowing you are not there. XXII NOW by this moon, before this moon shall wane I shall be dead or I shall be with you! No moral concept can outweigh the pain Past rack and wheel this absence puts me through; Faith, honour, pride, endurance, what the tongues Of tedious men will say, or what the law— For which of these do I fill up my lungs With brine and fire at every breath I draw? Time, and to spare, for patience by and by, Time to be cold and time to sleep alone; Let me no more until the hour I die Defraud my innocent senses of their own. Before this moon shall darken, say of me: She’s in her grave, or where she wants to be. XXIII I KNOW the face of Falsehood and her tongue Honeyed with unction, plausible with guile, Are dear to men, whom count me not among, That owe their daily credit to her smile; Such have been succoured out of great distress By her contriving, if accounts be true: Their deference now above the board, I guess, Discharges what beneath the board is due. As for myself, I’d liefer lack her aid Than eat her presence; let this building fall, But let me never lift my latch, afraid To hear her simpering accents in the hall, Nor force an entrance past mephitic airs Of stale patchouli hanging on my stairs. XXIV WHEREAS at morning in a jeweled crown I bit my fingers and was hard to please, Having shook disaster till the fruit fell down I feel tonight more happy and at ease; Feet running in the corridors, men quick- Buckling their sword-belts bumping down the stair, Challenge, and rattling bridge-chain, and the click Of hooves on pavement—this will clear the air. Private this chamber as it has not been In many a month of muffled hours; almost, Lulled by the uproar, I could lie serene And sleep, until all’s won, until all’s lost, And the door’s opened and the issue shown, And I walk forth Hell’s mistress . . . or my own. XXV PERIL upon the paths of this desire Lies like the natural darkness of the night, For me unpeopled; let him hence retire Whom as a child a shadow could affright; And fortune speed him from this dubious place Where roses blenched or blackened of their hue, Pallid and stemless float on undulant space, Or clustered hidden shock the hand with dew. Whom as a child the night’s obscurity Did not alarm, let him alone remain, Lanterned but by the longing in the eye, And warmed but by the fever in the vein, To lie with me, sentried from wrath and scorn By sleepless Beauty and her polished thorn. XXVI WOMEN have loved before as I love now; At least, in lively chronicles of the past— Of Irish waters by a Cornish prow Or Trojan waters by a Spartan mast Much to their cost invaded—here and there, Hunting the amorous line, skimming the rest, I find some woman bearing as I bear Love like a burning city in the breast. I think however that of all alive I only in such utter, ancient way Do suffer love; in me alone survive The unregenerate passions of a day When treacherous queens, with death upon the tread, Heedless and wilful, took their knights to bed. XXVII MOON, that against the lintel of the west Your forehead lean until the gate be swung, Longing to leave the world and be at rest, Being worn with faring and no longer young, Do you recall at all the Carian hill Where worn with loving, loving late you lay, Halting the sun because you lingered still, While wondering candles lit the Carian day? Ah, if indeed this memory to your mind Recall some sweet employment, pity me, That with the dawn must leave my love behind, That even now the dawn’s dim herald see! I charge you, goddess, in the name of one You loved as well: endure, hold off the sun. XXVIII WHEN we are old and these rejoicing veins Are frosty channels to a muted stream, And out of all our burning there remains No feeblest spark to fire us, even in dream, This be our solace: that it was not said When we were young and warm and in our prime, Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead, Sleeping away the unreturning time. O sweet, O heavy-lidded, O my love, When morning strikes her spear upon the land, And we must rise and arm us and reprove The insolent daylight with a steady hand, Be not discountenanced if the knowing know We rose from rapture but an hour ago. XXIX HEART, have no pity on this house of bone: Shake it with dancing, break it down with joy. No man holds mortgage on it; it is your own; To give, to sell at auction, to destroy. When you are blind to moonlight on the bed, When you are deaf to gravel on the pane, Shall quavering caution from this house instead Cluck forth at summer mischief in the lane? _All that delightful youth forbears to spend_ _Molestful age inherits, and the ground_ _Will have us; therefore, while we’re young, my friend—_ The Latin’s vulgar, but the advice is sound. Youth, have no pity; leave no farthing here For age to invest in compromise and fear. XXX LOVE is not all; it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain, Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution’s power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would. XXXI WHEN we that wore the myrtle wear the dust, And years of darkness cover up our eyes, And all our arrogant laughter and sweet lust Keep counsel with the scruples of the wise; When boys and girls that now are in the loins Of croaking lads, dip oar into the sea,— And who are these that dive for copper coins? No longer we, my love, no longer we— Then let the fortunate breathers of the air, When we lie speechless in the muffling mould, Tease not our ghosts with slander, pause not there To say that love is false and soon grows cold, But pass in silence the mute grave of two Who lived and died believing love was true. XXXII TIME, that is pleased to lengthen out the day For grieving lovers parted or denied, And pleased to hurry the sweet hours away From such as lie enchanted side by side, Is not my kinsman; nay, my feudal foe Is he that in my childhood was the thief Of all my mother’s beauty, and in woe My father bowed, and brought our house to grief. Thus, though he think to touch with hateful frost Your treasured curls, and your clear forehead line, And so persuade me from you, he has lost; Never shall he inherit what was mine. When Time and all his tricks have done their worst, Still will I hold you dear, and him accurst. XXXIII SORROWFUL dreams remembered after waking Shadow with dolour all the candid day; Even as I read, the silly tears out-breaking Splash on my hands and shut the page away. . . . Grief at the root, a dark and secret dolour, Harder to bear than wind-and-weather grief, Clutching the rose, draining its cheek of colour, Drying the bud, curling the opened leaf. Deep is the pond—although the edge be shallow, Frank in the sun, revealing fish and stone, Climbing ashore to turtle-head and mallow— Black at the centre beats a heart unknown. Desolate dreams pursue me out of sleep; Weeping I wake; waking, I weep, I weep. XXXIV MOST wicked words, forbear to speak them out. Utter them not again. Blaspheme no more Against our love with maxims learned from Doubt, Lest Death should get his foot inside the door. We are surrounded by a hundred foes; And he that at your bidding joins our feast, I stake my heart upon it, is one of those, Nor in their councils does he sit the least. Hark not his whisper; he is Time’s ally, Kinsman to Death and leman of Despair. Believe that I shall love you till I die; Believe, and thrust him forth, and arm the stair, And top the walls with spikes and splintered glass, That he pass gutted, should again he pass. XXXV CLEARLY my ruined garden as it stood Before the frost came on it I recall— Stiff marigolds, and what a trunk of wood The zinnia had, that was the first to fall; These pale and oozy stalks, these hanging leaves Nerveless and darkened, dripping in the sun, Cannot gainsay me, though the spirit grieves And wrings its hands at what the frost has done. If in a widening silence you should guess I read the moment with recording eyes, Taking your love and all your loveliness Into a listening body hushed of sighs, Though summer’s rife and the warm rose in season, Rebuke me not: I have a winter reason. XXXVI HEARING your words, and not a word among them Tuned to my liking, on a salty day When inland woods were pushed by winds that flung them Hissing to leeward like a ton of spray, I thought how off Matinicus the tide Came pounding in, came running through the Gut, While from the Rock the warning whistle cried, And children whimpered, and the doors blew shut; There in the autumn when the men go forth, With slapping skirts the island women stand In gardens stripped and scattered, peering north, With dahlia tubers dripping from the hand: The wind of their endurance, driving south, Flattened your words against your speaking mouth. XXXVII BELIEVE, if ever the bridges of this town, Whose towers were builded without fault or stain, Be taken, and its battlements go down, No mortal roof shall shelter me again; I shall not prop a branch against a bough To hide me from the whipping east or north, Nor tease to flame a heap of sticks, that now Am warmed by all the wonders of the earth. Do you take ship unto some happier shore In such event, and have no thought for me. I shall remain;—to share the ruinous floor With roofs that once were seen far out at sea; To cheer a mouldering army on the march, And beg from spectres by a broken arch. XXXVIII YOU say: “Since life is cruel enough at best,” You say: “Considering how our love is cursed, And housed so bleakly that the sea-gull’s nest Were better shelter, even as better nursed Between the breaker and the stingy reeds Ragged and coarse that hiss against the sand The gull’s brown chick, and hushed in all his needs, Than our poor love so harried through the land— You being too tender, even with all your scorn, To line his cradle with the world’s reproof, And I too devious, too surrendered, born Too far from home to hunt him even a roof Out of the rain—” Oh, tortured voice, be still! Spare me your premise: leave me when you will. XXXIX LOVE me no more, now let the god depart, If love be grown so bitter to your tongue! Here is my hand; I bid you from my heart Fare well, fare very well, be always young. As for myself, mine was a deeper drouth, I drank and thirsted still; but I surmise My kisses now are sand against your mouth, Teeth in your palm and pennies on your eyes. Speak but one cruel word, to shame my tears; Go, but in going, stiffen up my back To meet the yelping of the mustering years— Dim, trotting shapes that seldom will attack Two with a light who match their steps and sing: To one alone and lost, another thing. XL YOU loved me not at all, but let it go; I loved you more than life, but let it be. As the more injured party, this being so, The hour’s amenities are all to me— The choice of weapons; and I gravely choose To let the weapons tarnish where they lie, And spend the night in eloquent abuse Of senators and popes and such small fry And meet the morning standing, and at odds With heaven and earth and hell and any fool That calls his soul his own, and all the gods, And all the children getting dressed for school . . . And you will leave me, and I shall entomb What’s cold by then in an adjoining room. XLI I SAID in the beginning, did I not?— Prophetic of the end, though unaware How light you took me, ignorant that you thought I spoke to see my breath upon the air: If you walk east at daybreak from the town To the cliff’s foot, by climbing steadily You cling at noon whence there is no way down But to go toppling backward to the sea. And not for birds nor birds’-eggs, so they say, But for a flower that in these fissures grows, Forms have been seen to move throughout the day Skyward; but what its name is no one knows. ’Tis said you find beside them on the sand This flower, relinquished by the broken hand. XLII O AILING Love, compose your struggling wing! Confess you mortal; be content to die. How better dead, than be this awkward thing Dragging in dust its feathers of the sky, Hitching and rearing, plunging beak to loam, Upturned, disheveled, utt’ring a weak sound Less proud than of the gull that rakes the foam, Less kind than of the hawk that scours the ground. While yet your awful beauty, even at bay, Beats off the impious eye, the outstretched hand, And what your hue or fashion none can say, Vanish, be fled, leave me a wingless land . . . Save where one moment down the quiet tide Fades a white swan, with a black swan beside. XLIII SUMMER, be seen no more within this wood; Nor you, red Autumn, down its paths appear; Let no more the false mitrewort intrude Nor the dwarf cornel nor the gentian here; You too be absent, unavailing Spring, Nor let those thrushes that with pain conspire From out this wood their wild arpeggios fling, Shaking the nerves with memory and desire. Only that season which is no man’s friend, You, surly Winter, in this wood be found; Freeze up the year; with sleet these branches bend Though rasps the locust in the fields around. Now darken, sky! Now shrieking blizzard, blow!— Farewell, sweet bank; be blotted out with snow. XLIV IF TO be left were to be left alone, And lock the door and find one’s self again— Drag forth and dust Penates of one’s own That in a corner all too long have lain; Read Brahms, read Chaucer, set the chessmen out In classic problem, stretch the shrunken mind Back to its stature on the rack of thought— Loss might be said to leave its boon behind. But fruitless conference and the interchange With callow wits of bearded _cons_ and _pros_ Enlist the neutral daylight, and derange A will too sick to battle for repose. Neither with you nor with myself, I spend Loud days that have no meaning and no end. XLV I KNOW my mind and I have made my choice; Not from your temper does my doom depend; Love me or love me not, you have no voice In this, that is my portion to the end. Your presence and your favours, the full part That you could give, you now can take away: What lies between your beauty and my heart Not even you can trouble or betray. Mistake me not—unto my inmost core I do desire your kiss upon my mouth; They have not craved a cup of water more That bleach upon the deserts of the south; Here might you bless me; what you cannot do Is bow me down, that have been loved by you. XLVI EVEN in the moment of our earliest kiss, When sighed the straitened bud into the flower, Sat the dry seed of most unwelcome this; And that I knew, though not the day and hour. Too season-wise am I, being country-bred, To tilt at autumn or defy the frost: Snuffing the chill even as my fathers did, I say with them, “What’s out tonight is lost.” I only hoped, with the mild hope of all Who watch the leaf take shape upon the tree, A fairer summer and a later fall Than in these parts a man is apt to see, And sunny clusters ripened for the wine: I tell you this across the blackened vine. XLVII WELL, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly; In my own way, and with my full consent. Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely Went to their deaths more proud than this one went. Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping I will confess; but that’s permitted me; Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free. If I had loved you less or played you slyly I might have held you for a summer more, But at the cost of words I value highly, And no such summer as the one before. Should I outlive this anguish—and men do— I shall have only good to say of you. XLVIII NOW by the path I climbed, I journey back. The oaks have grown; I have been long away. Taking with me your memory and your lack I now descend into a milder day; Stripped of your love, unburdened of my hope, Descend the path I mounted from the plain; Yet steeper than I fancied seems the slope And stonier, now that I go down again. Warm falls the dusk; the clanking of a bell Faintly ascends upon this heavier air; I do recall those grassy pastures well: In early spring they drove the cattle there. And close at hand should be a shelter, too, From which the mountain peaks are not in view. XLIX THERE is a well into whose bottomless eye, Though I were flayed, I dare not lean and look, Sweet once with mountain water, now gone dry, Miraculously abandoned by the brook Wherewith for years miraculously fed It kept a constant level cold and bright, Though summer parched the rivers in their bed; Withdrawn these waters, vanished overnight. There is a word I dare not speak again, A face I never again must call to mind; I was not craven ever nor blenched at pain, But pain to such degree and of such kind As I must suffer if I think of you, Not in my senses will I undergo. L THE heart once broken is a heart no more, And is absolved from all a heart must be; All that it signed or chartered heretofore Is cancelled now, the bankrupt heart is free; So much of duty as you may require Of shards and dust, this and no more of pain, This and no more of hope, remorse, desire, The heart once broken need support again. How simple ’tis, and what a little sound It makes in breaking, let the world attest: It struggles, and it fails; the world goes round, And the moon follows it. Heart in my breast, ’Tis half a year now since you broke in two; The world’s forgotten well, if the world knew. LI IF IN the years to come you should recall, When faint at heart or fallen on hungry days, Or full of griefs and little if at all From them distracted by delights or praise; When failing powers or good opinion lost Have bowed your neck, should you recall to mind How of all men I honoured you the most, Holding you noblest among mortal-kind: Might not my love—although the curving blade From whose wide mowing none may hope to hide, Me long ago below the frosts had laid— Restore you somewhat to your former pride? Indeed I think this memory, even then, Must raise you high among the run of men. LII OH, SLEEP forever in the Latmian cave, Mortal Endymion, darling of the Moon! Her silver garments by the senseless wave Shouldered and dropped and on the shingle strewn, Her fluttering hand against her forehead pressed, Her scattered looks that trouble all the sky, Her rapid footsteps running down the west— Of all her altered state, oblivious lie! Whom earthen you, by deathless lips adored, Wild-eyed and stammering to the grasses thrust, And deep into her crystal body poured The hot and sorrowful sweetness of the dust: Whereof she wanders mad, being all unfit For mortal love, that might not die of it. THE END TRANSCRIBER NOTES Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed. Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur. [The end of _Fatal Interview_ by Edna St. Vincent Millay]