The Final Countdown

In little over a week, I will be entering the final quarter of my 2013 Poetry Challenge. I have read at least one poem (though often more) every day so far this year, and for each day I have selected one poem to write a small paragraph about. It's been a rewarding experience, and the discipline involved has kept me reading and thinking about poetry all year long, quite a feat! Although often personal and poorly expressed, the little write-ups have forced me to engage in poetry in a way I haven't regularly done since grad school. You probably don't care, but my brain is very much appreciative.

Here's today's poem and write-up, in case you were curious (but mostly I just want to talk about Edna with the world):

Scrub

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

If I grow bitterly,
Like a gnarled and stunted tree,
Bearing harshly of my youth
Puckered fruit that sears the mouth;
If I make of my drawn boughs
An inhospitable house,
Out of which I never pry
Towards the water and the sky,
Under which I stand and hide
And hear the day go by outside;
It is that a wind too strong
Bent my back when I was young,
It is that I fear the rain
Lest it blister me again.

21 September 2013

“Scrub” Edna St. Vincent Millay

I’m in an Edna mood these days. I’m not sure whether this is a good, therapeutic move on my part, or just a bad influence that sparks my continued wallowing. Anyway, I was thinking about how much I admire and relate to Edna and wondering what she would write if she were alive today and thinking that her rhyming and metaphor-centric style is something I would not readily appreciate in anyone else. “Scrub” (she couldn’t know TLC would ruin this word for us all) is yet another one of her poems that compares grief, specifically the wounds of youth – for we’ve all been stilted by our young experiences, have we not? – to the ugliness of nature, a “gnarled and stunted tree”. It claims that if she is bitter now, it is the result of youthful sorrows.  “It is that I fear the rain / Lest it blister me again.” The beauty is the simplicity. We can all relate. We’ve all been injured, particularly in our youth. Those injuries make us wiser, but they can also make us bitter, untrusting, and hesitant to let people get close to us. I was looking for a hopeful ending to the poem, but I can’t seem to find one. The only word that gives me any hope is the “If” from the very beginning, which gives only the slightest suggestion that the speaker is perhaps not bitter but could have been if she let her sorrow overcome her.