We Need Their Voices Today! (18) Edna St. Vincent Millay
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 23 Oct 2017
John Scales Avery, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service
Introduction
This is a collection of biographical sketches showing people whose wise voices from the past can help to guide us today. All of the women and men, brief glimpses of whose lives and ideas are portrayed here, gave a high place to compassion. None of them was a slave to greed. We need their voices today!
[Note from TMS editor: It will be posted one biographical sketch per week]
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The beautiful red-haired American poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), is known for her lyric poetry, but she also wrote some of the finest sonnets in the English language, combining classic form with modern imagery. Many of these sonnets are based on the emotions that she experienced in her love affairs with both men and women. However, my own favorite is a serious sequence of eighteen sonnets, “Epitaph for the Race of Man”, published in 1934, just as the catastrophe of World War II was about to engulf our planet.
The basic premise of Millay’s “Epitaph” is that we know from the evolutionary history of life on earth, that no species survives forever. She speculates on what will be the final cause of the extinction of the human race, and concludes that Man will die by his own hand, since none the innumerable disasters that nature has thrown at us over the millennia has persuaded humankind “to lay aside the lever and the spade, and be as dust among the dusts that blow”. Here are a few of the sonnets from the sequence:
“Oh Earth, unhappy planet, born to die,
Might I your scribe and your confessor be,
What wonders must you not relate to me
Of Man, who, when his destiny was high
Strode like the sun into the middle sky
And shone an hour, and who so bright as he,
And like the sun went down into the sea,
Leaving no spark to be remembered by.
But no; you have not learned in all these years
To tell the leopard and the newt apart;
Man, with his singular laughter, his droll tears,
His engines and his conscience and his art,
Made but a simple sound upon your ears:
The patient beating of an animal heart.”“Alas for Man, so stealthily betrayed,
Bearing the bad cell in him from the start,
Pumping and feeding on his healthy heart
That wild disorder never to be stayed
When once established, destined to invade
With angry hordes the true and proper part,
‘Til Reason joggles in the headsman’s cart.
And Mania spits from every balustrade.
Would he had searched his closet for his bane,
Where lurked the trusted ancient of his soul,
Obsequious Greed, and seen that visage plain;
Would he had whittled treason from his side
In his stout youth and bled his body whole,
Then had he died a king, or never died.”“Here lies, and none to mourn him but the sea,
That falls incessant on the empty shore,
Most various Man, cut down to spring no more;
Before his prime, even in his infancy
Cut down, and all the clamour that was he,
Silenced; and all the riveted pride he wore,
A rusted iron column whose tall core
The rains have tunneled like an aspen tree.
Man, doughty Man, what power has brought you low,
That heaven itself in arms could not persuade
To lay aside the lever and the spade
And be as dust among the dusts that blow?
Whence, whence the broadside? Whose the heavy blade?…
Strive not to speak, poor scattered mouth; I know.”
It seems to me that although Millay’s words were extremely appropriate as a warning to humankind in 1934, they are even heavier with meaning today, when we are threatened with the disaster of thermonuclear war as well as catastrophic climate change, both self-inflicted. The cancer-like root of the problem is “obsequious Greed”. Please read the whole sonnet sequence yourself. Millay speaks eloquently to us over the years.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, eloquent poet with a deep concern for the future of humanity, we need your voice today!
Together
Contents:
18 Edna St. Vincent Millay
19 Bertha von Suttner
20 George Orwell
21 Helen Keller
22 We need their voices, and yours!
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John Scales Avery, Ph.D., who was part of a group that shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and Associate Professor Emeritus at the H.C. Ørsted Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is chairman of both the Danish National Pugwash Group and the Danish Peace Academy and received his training in theoretical physics and theoretical chemistry at M.I.T., the University of Chicago and the University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles both on scientific topics and on broader social questions. His most recent books are Information Theory and Evolution and Civilization’s Crisis in the 21st Century (pdf).
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 23 Oct 2017.
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Thanks for posting this, John. I’m looking forward to reading this sequence of sonnets. I’ve been a fan of Millay’s since my teen years. I consider her one of the great American poets of the 20th Century. One should note that she was also a political activist–no ivory-tower dweller! She marched in the streets to oppose the sham trial, conviction (and later execution) of Sacco and Vanzetti. She is a great model to hold above our academic poetasters now!
I would delete the “Monster from Monticello” from the list. He was one of several models I chose to exemplify the disconnectedness of the power elite from humanity. He was a psychopath who wrote to a friend about his disregard for the lives lost of patriots fighting tyranny. In reality, he was the tyrant. [“Human Connectedness and the Disconnected Power Elite of America.” Op.Ed.News, August 22, 2017).