My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
PERHAPS THERE IS no more famous celebration of madcap fun than “First Fig,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950). This gifted writer created extraordinary works while living a remarkable and unconventional life, romancing both women and men. English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy said of her work: “The America of the 1920s made two major contributions to the world: skyscrapers and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.”
Millay and her two sisters were raised in Maine by a divorced mother who struggled to make ends meet but encouraged her daughters’ intellectual aspirations. As a child, Millay was exuberant and curious: She loved to learn and write, especially poems, and won poetry prizes from a children’s magazine. In high school, she wrote and starred in school plays and edited the school’s literary magazine.
At age nineteen, she had a high school diploma but no money for college. She stayed home, keeping house and writing. She entered the lengthy poem “Renascence” in a poetry contest under the name E. Vincent Millay. Its fourth-place finish was controversial, as many believed it should have won. When it appeared in 1912 in The Lyric Year anthology, “Renascence” was warmly praised by critics. Another poet represented in the volume, Arthur Davison Ficke, who later became friends with Millay, scoffed at the idea a twenty-year-old woman had penned the powerful “Renascence,” saying it had to have been written by “a brawny male.” An offended Millay replied: “I simply will not be a ‘brawny male.’ … I cling to my femininity!”
Her femininity was striking in her delicate features, and photographs show an ethereal quality to her beauty. However, from an early age Millay adopted androgynous styles that, together with her traditionally feminine qualities, played exuberantly and cleverly with gender conventions. From childhood, she often used her masculine middle name, Vincent, and she sometimes sported neckties.
Millay began attending Vassar College in 1913, when she was 21, with tuition support from arts patron Caroline B. Dow, who was strongly impressed by Millay’s recitation of her own poetry. At Vassar, then exclusively a women’s college, romances between students were common, and Millay had several affairs with wealthier classmates. One of Millay’s Vassar romances was with Edith Wynne Matthison, who would go on to become a stage and silent film actor. In a letter to Matthison, the young writer revealed: “Somehow I know that your feeling for me … is of the nature of love.” The epistle was signed: “With love, Vincent Millay.”
After graduating in 1917, Millay settled into Greenwich Village, where she worked with Eugene O’Neill’s Provincetown Players and helped start the experimental drama group Cherry Lane Theatre. Here again, she made no secret of her bisexuality, boldly and openly dating both women and men. When staying in Paris in 1921, she and American artist Thelma Wood became romantically involved. (Wood’s relationship with Djuna Barnes was portrayed in lightly fictionalized form in Barnes’ classic novel Nightwood, one of the earliest modern novels to explicitly depict romance between women.)
In 1923, Millay became the first female winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” from A Few Figs from Thistles (1920). While best-known for her poetry, Millay also wrote plays, including The Lamp and the Bell.
She was known for her bold depictions of the female experience, especially in sexuality. Her biographer Nancy Milford declared: “Edna St. Vincent Millay became the herald of the New Woman.” Critic Carl Van Doren observed: “Rarely since Sappho” had a female poet “written as outspokenly as Millay.” The comparison to Sappho is apt since both great female writers pursued love affairs with women as well as men and wrote about erotic love between women. In 1923, Millay married 43-year-old Eugen Jan Boissevain (1880–1949). This heterosexual marriage was an open one, with both spouses engaging in romances with other people.
Millay’s poem “Witch-Wife” was courageous in capturing the erotic feelings women can have for other women:
She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.
She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun ’tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.
She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.
The poem opens with a sense of the robust, letting us know its subject is “neither pink nor pale.” Yet there is also a sense of the classically ethereal in its sensuality, as we are told the subject of the narrator’s desire “learned her hands in a fairy-tale” and “her mouth on a valentine.” Even as we’re transported to a dreamlike world, the lines conjure images of women using hands and mouths to sexually excite and satisfy one another.
Considering how many lesbians and bisexual women from the mid-20th century to the present would identify with witchcraft and Wicca, it is oddly prescient that Millay saw the subject of this love poem as a kind of “witch.” Although not specified, “she was not made for any man” suggests the poem is about Sapphic love, albeit one tinged with disappointment for the narrator, as the woman she describes seems to be polyamorous, so she “never will be all mine.” Still, that “She loves me all that she can” suggests the “Witch-Wife” loves the narrator as much as she is able to love any individual, and that the narrator is, like the author, a woman.
Close cousins envy and sexual jealousy mingle in “She has more hair than she needs,” which is accented when the sun falls upon it as “a woe” to the narrator, implying the thick hair she envies could also represent other lovers. Right after we are told of the narrator’s discomfort caused by envy and jealousy, we are reminded of how enchanted she is by the “Witch-Wife,” whose voice enthralls as it varies in tone and modulation, a lilting musical instrument like a “string of colored beads.” That voice reminds the narrator of the origin of all life, and the threat of death, as it invites her “into the sea.” Or then again, perhaps it simply and playfully invites her “into the sea” for the warm relaxation of a swim.
The Lamp and the Bell was a fantasy play that Millay wrote for the fiftieth anniversary of Vassar College’s Alumnae Association in 1921. It is set in a fictional medieval Italian court, with its story centering on princesses Beatrice and Bianca, whose relationship is tested through various trials. Literary scholar Sarah Parker argues that the play is “an overlooked lesbian modernist work” and “represents an outspoken defense of female same-sex love at a time when such ‘romantic friendships’ were under increased scrutiny, especially at women’s colleges.” Parker points out that Millay cleverly “cloaks her controversial theme in the antiquated idiom of Renaissance verse drama” to escape “the censor.” By putting characters in fairy tale drag, they sidestep homophobes and “elevate lesbian love.”
A character in the play says of Beatrice and Bianca: “I never knew a pair of lovers more constant than those two.” The intensity of their attraction is made vivid when Bianca says to Beatrice: “You are a burning lamp to me, a flame/ The wind cannot blow out, and I shall hold you/ High in my hand against whatever darkness.” Beatrice tells Bianca: “You are to me a silver bell in a tower/ And when it rings I know I am near home.”
Denise Noe is a writer based in Missouri.
