I Shall Go Back Again to the Bleak Shore

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

Read comments from David Anthony.

2 Sonnets in Memory (University of Pennsylvania)
"Thou art not lovelier than lilacs..."
"Time does non bring relief..."
"Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring"
"Not in this chamber only at my nascency"
"If I should larn, in some quite casual fashion"
Bluebeard
"I shall forget you before long, my dearest" (sound)
"Loving y'all less than life, a little less"
"Into the gold vessel of great song"
"How healthily their anxiety upon the flooring"
"Love is not blind..."
"Not with libations, but with shouts and laughter"
"The light comes back with Columbine..."
"Oh, call back not I am faithful to a vow"
"I practice but ask that you lot exist always fair"
"I pray you lot if you lot love me, bear my joy"
"I think I should have loved you presently"
"When I too long take looked upon your face up"
"And y'all as well must die, belovèd grit"
"I but know that every 60 minutes with y'all"
"Notwithstanding will I harvest dazzler where information technology grows"
"Sometimes when I am wearied all of a sudden"
"Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare"
"Merely until this cigarette is ended"
"I shall go back once more to the dour shore"
"Cherish you then the promise I shall forget"

"One thousand fine art not lovelier than lilacs..."

1000 fine art not lovelier than lilacs,--no,

Nor honeysuckle; one thousand art not more than fair

Than small white single poppies,--I can acquit

Thy beauty; though I curve before thee, though

From left to right, not knowing where to go,

I turn my troubled eyes, nor here nor there

Find any refuge from thee, even so I swear

So has it been with mist,--with moonlight so.

Like him who twenty-four hours by solar day unto his draught

Of frail poison adds him one drop more than

Till he may drink unharmed the decease of ten,

Fifty-fifty so, inured to beauty, who take quaffed

Each hr more than deeply than the hour earlier,

I potable--and live--what has destroyed some men.

"Time does not bring relief..."

Time does non bring relief; y'all all have lied

Who told me time would ease me of my pain!

I miss him in the weeping of the rain;

I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

The old snows melt from every mountain-side,

And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;

But last twelvemonth's bitter loving must remain

Heaped on my heart, and my erstwhile thoughts bide!

There are a hundred places where I fear

To go,--and so with his retention they skirt!

And entering with relief some quiet place

Where never cruel his foot or shone his face

I say, "There is no retentivity of him here!"

And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

"Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring"

Mindful of you the sodden globe in spring,

And all the flowers that in the springtime grow,

And dusty roads, and thistles, and the slow

Rising of the round moon, all throats that sing

The summer through, and each departing wing,

And all the nests that the bared branches bear witness,

And all winds that in any weather blow,

And all the storms that the four seasons bring.

You go no more on your exultant feet

Up paths that only mist and morn knew,

Or watch the air current, or mind to the beat

Of a bird'south wings also loftier in air to view,--

Merely you lot were something more than than young and sweet

And off-white,--and the long twelvemonth remembers yous.

Not in this bedroom merely at my birth"

Non in this chamber only at my nascence--

When the long hours of that mysterious night

Were over, and the morning was in sight--

I cried, only in strange places, steppe and firth

I have not seen, through alien grief and mirth;

And never shall i room contain me quite

Who in and then many rooms first saw the low-cal,

Child of all mothers, native of the globe.

So is no warmth for me at any burn

To-day, when the world's fire has burned then depression;

I kneel, spending my breath in vain desire,

At that cold hearth which one fourth dimension roared and so potent,

And straighten back in weariness, and long

To get together upwards my little gods and go.

"If I should learn, in some quite coincidental way"

If I should acquire, in some quite coincidental fashion,

That you were gone, not to return over again--

Read from the dorsum-page of a paper, say,

Held by a neighbor in a subway train,

How at the corner of this avenue

And such a street (then are the papers filled)

A hurrying human being--who happened to be you--

At noon to-solar day had happened to be killed,

I should not weep aloud--I could not cry

Aloud, or wring my easily in such a place--

I should just watch the station lights blitz by

With a more than careful involvement on my face,

Or heighten my eyes and read with greater care

Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

Bluebeard

This door you might not open, and yous did;

So enter now, and see for what slight affair

Y'all are betrayed. . . . Here is no treasure hid,

No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring

The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain

For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,

Merely only what yous see. . . . Look yet again--

An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.

Yet this alone out of my life I kept

Unto myself, lest whatever know me quite;

And you did so profane me when you crept

Unto the threshold of this room to-nighttime

That I must never more than behold your confront.

This at present is yours. I seek another identify.

"I shall forget you presently, my dear" (sound)

I shall forget you lot soon, my dear,

And then make the most of this, your little day,

Your petty calendar month, your niggling half a twelvemonth,

Ere I forget, or dice, or move away,

And we are done forever; by and by

I shall forget you, as I said, just at present,

If you lot entreat me with your loveliest lie

I will protest you with my favorite vow.

I would indeed that love were longer-lived,

And vows were non and so brittle as they are,

But and so it is, and nature has contrived

To struggle on without a interruption thus far,

Whether or not we find what we are seeking

Is idle, biologically speaking.

"Loving you less than life, a niggling less"

Loving you lot less than life, a fiddling less

Than bitter-sugariness upon a cleaved wall

Or bush-league-wood smoke in fall, I confess

I cannot swear I love you not at all.

For at that place is that almost yous in this light--

A yellowish darkness, sinister of pelting--

Which sturdily recalls my stubborn sight

To dwell on you, and dwell on you once again.

And I am made aware of many a calendar week

I shall consume, remembering in what fashion

Your brown hair grows near your brow and cheek,

And what divine absurdities you say:

Till all the world, and I, and surely you,

Will know I beloved you, whether or non I do.

"Into the golden vessel of great song"

Into the golden vessel of great song

Let usa pour all our passion; chest to breast

Let other lovers lie, in dearest and rest;

Not we,--articulate, so, only with the tongue

Of all the world: the churning blood, the long

Shuddering quiet, the desperate hot palms pressed

Sharply together upon the escaping guest,

The common soul, unguarded, and grown stiff.

Longing solitary is singer to the lute;

Let still on nettles in the open sigh

The minstrel, that in slumber is equally mute

As whatever man, and honey be far and high,

That else forsakes the topmost branch, a fruit

Institute on the basis by every passer-by.

"How healthily their feet upon the floor"

How healthily their feet upon the floor

Strike down! These are no spirits, simply a band

Of children, surely, leaping hand in paw

Into the air in groups of three and four,

Wearing their silken rags as if they wore

Leaves only and light grasses, or a strand

Of black elusive seaweed oozing sand,

And running hard every bit if forth a shore.

I know how lost forever, and at length

How however these lovely tossing limbs shall lie,

And the vivid laughter and the panting breath;

And yet, before such beauty and such forcefulness,

Once more, every bit always when the dance is high,

I am rebuked that I believe in death.

"Love is not blind..."

Dearest is non blind. I see with unmarried eye

Your ugliness and other women's grace.

I know the imperfection of your confront,

The eyes too broad autonomously, the brow too loftier

For dazzler. Learned from earliest youth am I

In loveliness, and cannot so erase

Its letters from my mind, that I may trace

You faultless, I must love until I dice.

More subtle is the sovereignty of love:

And then am I caught that when I say, "Not fair,"

'Tis but as if I said, "Not hither--not there

Not risen--non writing letters." Well I know

What is this beauty men are blathering of;

I wonder only why they prize it so.

"Not with libations, but with shouts and laughter"

Non with libations, but with shouts and laughter

We drenched the altars of Beloved's sacred grove,

Shaking to world greenish fruits, impatient after

The launching of the coloured moths of Honey.

Honey'due south proper myrtle and his mother's zone

We bound near our irreligious brows,

And fettered him with garlands of our ain,

And spread a banquet in his frugal business firm.

Not yet the god has spoken; but I fright

Though we should suspension our bodies in his flame,

And pour our claret upon his altar, hither

Henceforward is a grove without a proper name,

A pasture to the shaggy goats of Pan,

Whence abscond forever a woman and a man.

"The low-cal comes back with Columbine..."

The light comes back with Columbine; she brings

A touch of this, a trivial bear upon of that,

Coloured confetti, and a favour chapeau,

Patches, and powder, dolls that work by strings

And moons that work by switches, all the things

That delight a ill human being'south fancy, and a flat

Spry ambulatory kiss, and a small pat

Upon the pillow, newspaper offerings.

The light goes out with her; the shadows sprawl.

Where she has left her fragrance like a shawl

I lie lonely and pluck the counterpane,

Or on a dizzy elbow rise and hark

And downwards like dominoes along the dark

Her little dizzy laughter spills again!

"Oh, call back non I am faithful to a vow"

Oh, think not I am true-blue to a vow!

Faithless am I save to love's cocky alone.

Were you non lovely I would leave you at present:

After the feet of beauty fly my ain.

Were you not still my hunger'due south rarest food,

And water ever to my wildest thirst,

I would desert you--think not but I would!

And seek another every bit I sought you first.

But you are mobile equally the veering air,

And all your charms more changeful than the tide,

Wherefore to exist inconstant is no care:

I have but to keep at your side.

So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,

I am nigh faithless when I most am true.

"I practise only enquire that y'all be always fair"

I do but ask that you be always off-white

That I forever may continue kind;

Knowing me what I am, you should non cartel

To lapse from dazzler ever, nor seek to demark

My alterable mood with lesser cords;

Weeping and such soft matters must invite

To further vagrancy; and biting words

Abrasion soon to irremediable flying,

Wherefore I pray you if you lot love me dearly,

Less dearest to hold me than your own brilliant charms,

Whence it may fall that until death, or almost,

I shall non move to struggle from your artillery:

Fade if you lot must,--I would but bid y'all be

Like the sweet yr, doing all things graciously.

"I pray you lot if you love me, acquit my joy"

I pray you if yous love me, conduct my joy

A little while, or let me weep your tears;

I, too, have seen the quavering Fate destroy

Your destiny'south bright spinning--the boring sheares

Meeting non neatly, chewing at the thread,

Nor tin can y'all well be less aware how fine,

How staunch as wire, and how unwarranted

Endures the golden fortune that is mine.

I pray you for this day at to the lowest degree, my love,

Fare past my side, that journey in the sun;

Else must I turn me from the blossoming yr

And walk in grief the way that you lot have gone.

Let the states go forth together to the leap:

Love must exist this, if it be anything.

"I think I should have loved you lot presently"

I think I should have loved you presently,

And given in earnest words I flung in jest;

And lifted honest eyes for yous to see,

And defenseless your manus against my cheek and breast;

And all my pretty follies flung aside

That won you to me, and beneath your gaze,

Naked of reticence and shorn of pride,

Spread like a chart my petty wicked ways.

I, that had been to you, had yous remained,

But one more waking frorn a recurrent dream,

Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,

And walk your memory'south halls, austere, supreme,

A ghost in marble of a daughter y'all knew

Who would have loved you lot in a 24-hour interval or two.

"When I also long accept looked upon your face"

When I besides long have looked upon your face up,

Wherein for me a effulgence unobscured

Salve by the mists of brightness has its place,

And terrible beauty non to be endured,

I plow abroad reluctant from your lite,

And stand irresolute, a mind undone,

A silly, dazzled affair deprived of a sight

From having looked likewise long upon the lord's day.

Then is my daily life a narrow room

In which a fiddling while, uncertainly,

Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,

Amongst familiar things grown strange to me

Making my style, I pause, and feel, and hark,

Till I become accustomed to the night.

"And you too must die, belovèd dust"

And yous equally well must die, belovèd dust,

And all your beauty stand you in no stead;

This flawless, vital paw, this perfect head,

This body of flame and steel, earlier the gust

Of Decease, or under his autumnal frost,

Shall be as any foliage, exist no less expressionless

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 ascend

Upon that day and wander down the air

Obscurely as the unattended flower,

It mattering not how beautiful yous were,

Or how belovèed above all else that dies.

"I only know that every hour with yous"

I merely know that every hour with you

Is torture to me, and that I would be

From your 2 piognant lovelinesses free!

Rainbows, dark-green fire, white diamonds, the trigger-happy bluish

Of shimmering ice-bergs, or to be shot through

With lightning or a sword incessantly--

Such things have beauty, doubtless; but to me

Mist, shadow, silence--these are lovely, likewise.

There is no shelter in you anywhere;

Rhythmic intolerable, your burning rays

Trample upon me, withering my breath;

I will be gone, and rid of you lot, I swear:

To stand upon the peaks of Dear e'er

Proves just that part of Dearest whose proper name is Death.

"Still will I harvest beauty where it grows"

Still will I harvest beauty where it grows:

In coloured mucus and the spotted fog

Surprised on foods forgotten; in ditch and bog

Filmed bright 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 blackness pupil in the green scum shows.

Her the inhabiter of divers places

Surmising at all doors, I push them all.

Oh, you lot that fearful of a creaking swivel

Turn back forevermore with craven faces,

I tell you lot Beauty bears an ultrafringe

Unguessed of you upon her gossamer shawl!

"Sometimes when I am exhausted suddenly"

Sometimes when I am wearied suddenly

Of all the things that are the outward you,

And my gaze wanders ere your tale is through

To webs of my own weaving, or I see

Abstractedly your hands about your knee

And wonder why I love you as I practice,

And then I recall, "Withal Sorrow thus he drew;"

Then I consider, "Pride thus painted he."

Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would note

In me a beauty that was never mine,

How first you knew me in a volume I wrote,

How offset yous loved me for a written line:

Then are we bound till broken is the throat

Of Song, and Art no more leads out the Nine.

"Euclid alone has looked on Beauty blank"

Euclid solitary has looked on Dazzler bare.

Let all who prate of Beauty agree their peace,

And lay them prone upon the earth and terminate

To ponder on themselves, the while they stare

At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere

In shapes of shifting lineage; permit geese

Gabble and hiss, just heroes seek release

From dusty bondage into luminous air.

O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,

When get-go the shaft into his vision shone

Of light anatomized! Euclid lone

Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they

Who, though once only and then but far away,

Have heard her massive sandal prepare on stone.

"But until this cigarette is ended" (audio)

Only until this cigarette is ended,

A little moment at the end of all,

While on the floor the tranquility ashes fall,

And in the firelight to a lance extended,

Bizarrely with the jazzing music composite,

The broken shadow dances on the wall,

I volition allow my memory to remember

The vision of you lot, by all my dreams attended.

And so adieu,--cheerio!--the dream is done.

Yours is a face of which I can forget

The colour and the features, every 1,

The words not always, and the smiles not yet;

Just in your mean solar day this moment is the sun

Upon a hill, after the sun has prepare.

"I shall go back again to the dour shore"

I shall go back again to the dour shore

And build a little shanty on the sand,

In such a way that the extremest band

Of brittle seaweed will escape my door

Merely by a g or two; and nevermore

Shall I render to have you by the hand;

I shall be gone to what I understand,

And happier than I ever was earlier.

The love that stood a moment in your optics,

The words that lay a moment on your natural language,

Are one with all that in a moment dies,

A picayune under-said and over-sung.

But I shall notice the sullen rocks and skies

Unchanged from what they were when I was young.

"Cherish y'all then the promise I shall forget"

Cherish y'all then the hope I shall forget

At length, my lord, Pieria?--put away

For your then passing sake, this oral fissure of dirt,

These mortal bones against my body set,

For all the puny fever and frail sweat

Of man love,--renounce for these, I say,

The Singing Mountain's memory, and betray

The silent lyre that hangs upon me yet?

Ah, just indeed, some solar day shall you awake,

Rather, from dreams of me, that at your side

So many nights, a lover and a bride,

But stern in my soul's chastity, have lain,

To walk the world forever for my sake,

And in each chamber find me gone over again!

newmancusid1996.blogspot.com

Source: http://www.sonnets.org/millay.htm