THE BUCK IN THE SNOW—Edna St. Vincent Millay—Harpers ($2).
For ten years smart young women have been trying to rival with their versification Edna St. Vincent Millay. But she eludes them all with her impertinent patter—"a few figs from thistles"—and, in more serious vein, with her virile poetry culminating in the lyric drama which sang itself to Deems Taylor's opera The King's Henchman, produced sensationally at the Metropolitan.
The new collection includes a little of the patter, more of the lyric wisdom, and several of her compact sonnets. The patter is less flippant:
Being young and green, I said in love's despite:
Never in the world will I to living wight
Give over, air my mind
To anyone,
Hang out its ancient secrets in the strong wind
To be shredded and faded. . . .
Oh, me, invaded
And sacked by wind and the sun!
The wisdom is sad:
How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers
The buck in the snow.
How strange a thing,—a mile away by now, it may be,
Under the heavy hemlocks that as the moments pass
Shift their loads a little, letting fall a feather of snow
Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.
Cynics of the baptismal font to the contrary, Edna St. Vincent Millay did not affect her lilting name, but she retains it in preference to her husband's, Eugen Jan Boissevain. A wealthy importer, he was previously married to the famed suffragist, Inez Mulholland. Miss Millay is proud of owning "the smallest house and garden in Manhattan" (Greenwich Village), though Thomas Hardy couples her with skyscrapers, "recessional buildings," as the two greatest things in America. She is coupled, further, with Edgar Allan Poe, as the only American poets to have attained translation into the Spanish.
Goggling Fish
ALL KNEELING — Anne Parrish — Harpers ($2.50).
As early as she could remember, Christabel Caine was conscious of her beauty, conscious of her power to make people serve her and adore her. When she writes a book of poetry that achieves success, new horizons open up before her. Leaving a flock of dear old doting Quaker aunts, she departs for New York to be Bohemian.
There a group of youthful artists learns to applaud her studied phrases, but they lose their charm "all kneeling," and her "yen" for adulation turns to other fields. She prefers "a pink-and-yellow apple" to "all the jewels in the Rue de la Paix," but marries a rich man and surrounds herself with the luxuries she pretends to despise. Too soon, she learns that her husband thinks more of his golf and his naps than of the blue, blue sky. "What peace it would be," she writes in her journal, "to let my body enter the sea, and sink, down, down, past goggling fish with drifting films of tails, past ribbons of ruffled seaweed, purple and brown," but she would be brave, she would go on.