"Let us to dinner, comrade, and be fed."

I just finished the greatest book in existence in this fine, fine multiverse:

Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Over 700 pages of Vincent's hand, it took me a little over a year to complete. Through the years, I have fallen for many poets and authors. My crushes usually give way to admiration and respect, but I move on. Even Austen, whose books I will reread until I'm dead, has lost her luster. Her books are great, but I don't feel a particular affection or connection to Jane, the person. To put it in modern terms, I don't want to have dinner with J.K. Rowling. But it's a little different with poets. I would love to have dinner with Mark Doty or Gregory Orr or Joy Harjo or Robert Bly or Robert Hass or any poet by the name of Robert, but I would sit there and awkwardly stare at them while feeling like I'm a total writing loser. Not so with Vincent. I would be nervously excited, but I would pour a couple of glasses of wine and say "Hey, Vincent, what do you think about a game of Scrabble?" Or "Isn't the moon nice tonight?" Maybe it's too soon to say this, but Vincent is my soul-poet; I just know it. 

Having finished her collected poems, I am moving on to her biography, Savage Beauty (Nancy Milford), and her letters (Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited by Allan Ross Macdougall). Why? I just want to know her. Maybe it's stalker-ish, but I just want to get as close as possible to the insides of her head. I have a vague understanding of her somewhat sensational life, but I want to know what she felt. Her poems, I think, are a good indication. Sure, there's always an element of fiction in the poems we write, but I think it's safe to say that Vincent the real, live woman was as full of passion and opinions as her poems suggest. She, like me, was capable of feeling the highest highs and the lowest lows. She truly, for good or ill, lived, loved, and lost.

I'm not saying I love every one of her poems. Nope. Not possible. Not even ideal. That would be totally weird. But there are so, so many that speak to me, piercingly. How to pick one last poem to share with you before moving on to new subjects, new poets? Randomly pick a dog-ear, I suppose. And yet, not so random after all. "Let us to dinner, comrade, and be fed."

Sonnet clxxiv

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you

All through my life?—Sharing my fire, my bed,

Sharing—oh, worst of all things!—the same head?—

And, when I feed myself, feeding you, too?

So be it, then, if what seems true, is true:

Let us to dinner, comrade, and be fed;

I cannot die till you yourself are dead,

And, with you living, I can live life through.

Yet have you done me harm, ungracious guest,

Spying upon my ardent offices

With frosty look; robbing my nights of rest;

And making harder things I did with ease.

You will die with me: but I shall, at best,

Forgive you with restraint, for deeds like these.