To a Young Girl by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1928)

This collection of poems is what made me a lifelong poetry whore. It was a gift from my grandma, who wouldn’t necessarily approve of that description of myself. But Edna would love it.

I appreciate coming back to this poem as an “old” because when I first read it in high school, I identified with the subject. Now I identify with the speaker, whose tenderness towards a girl’s sadness is palpable and an experience I now share.

My little fairy tattoo is one of my first. In fact, she is of legal drinking age now! I got it when I was in the throes of Millay’s poetry, and I picked it off the wall (!) because the second I saw it, I thought of this poem. The ink is all faded, and a bit of the wing is somehow missing, which I think happened in the scab-phase, but maybe the artist messed up? Either way, I’m okay with it, and not just because I hardly ever see it since it’s on my back. It’s simply a part of aging that ink fades and bits of wing fall off. Edna would say that only makes us more lovely.

Short Stuff:

• Millay was the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
• She was a contemporary of T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, but she wasn’t on board with the modernism style and ended up being somewhat overlooked, though critically acclaimed.

Topics in this poem:

the necessity of grief; aging; cry-babies and rainbows

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To a Young Girl

Shall I despise you that your colorless tears
Made rainbows in your lashes, and you forgot to weep?
Would we were half so wise, that eke a grief out
By sitting in the dark, until we fall asleep.

I only fear lest, being by nature sunny,
By and by you will weep no more at all,
And fall asleep in the light, having lost with the tears
The color in the lashes that comes as the tears fall.
I would not have you darken your lids with weeping,
Beautiful eyes, but I would have you weep enough
To wet the fingers of the hand held over the eyelids,
And stain a little the light frock’s delicate stuff.
For there came into my mind, as I watched you winking the tears down,
Laughing faces, blown from the west and the east,
Faces lovely and proud that I have prized and cherished;
Nor were the loveliest among them those that had wept the least.

–Edna St. Vincent Millay