Tag Archives: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Maine Interlude

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Maine has a gorgeous, rugged coastline. I just spent a week around Blue Hill, Maine with family, not doing much besides visiting, eating, and playing with color settings on my camera that I didn’t know I had.

The seaweed there is a bright yellow-orange that reminded me of one of my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who came from Maine.

I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand
In such a way that the extremest band
Of brittle seaweed will escape my door
But by a yard or two, and nevermore
Shall I return to take you by the hand;
I shall be gone to what I understand
And happier than I ever was before.

The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
The words that lay a moment on your tongue,
Are one with all that in a moment dies,
A little under-said and over-sung;
But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I imagine the coast of Maine in winter would be a bleak thing indeed. In summer, however, it’s quite glorious.

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s (and my) bleak shore

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I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand
In such a way that the extremest band
Of brittle seaweed shall escape my door
But by a yard or two; and nevermore
Shall I return to take you by the hand.


I shall be gone to what I understand,
And happier than I ever was before.
The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
The words that lay a moment on your tongue,
Are one with all that in a moment dies,
A little under-said and over-sung.


But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.


Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets remain favorites of mine for their dense, explosive quality that manage to retain such poise and attitude. On a bleak morning after rain, I woke up early and came to this deserted, rickity old platform to watch the clouds part. Millay’s words started running through my head. Remembering a line like “I will go back again to the bleak shore” is like finding a word on the tip of your tongue–it helps verbalize what I lack words for.

Why Milton Makes Writers Look Bad

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One on my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, would sit and create sonnets in her head, not writing them down until each line was perfect. Milton, as we all learned in school, was blind and he said Paradise Lost to an amanuensis as he composed it. He claimed that a divine spirit inspired him at night and in the morning he would recite new verses. Both of these authors knew what they wanted to say before committing to print. I envy them.


I seem to be working out the novel as I go. My story hasn’t changed since the first draft, but they way I want to tell it has. I’m in the midst of tedious editing as I change the chronology and presentation of events. The thing that bothers me is that I can’t really write in an inspired way for long stretches. It’s more like solving, or rather creating, a puzzle at this point. So I write a bit, think a bit, switch a scene or delete something, and read over it. It’s a series of stops and starts.

Of course, when I was in the middle of the first draft, you wouldn’t have heard me going on about “inspired long stretches.” Those tended to only come after a fair amount of hard work, but looking back it seems like halcyon days. Now it also seems best to work everything out in your head first. Think of all the time and typing I could have saved. Maybe if my novel were 14 lines I could do that, but I certainly couldn’t come anywhere close to Milton. The bastard.