THE PAINTED HILLS OF ARIZONA
The rainbows all lie crumpled on these hills,
The red dawns scattered on their colored sills.
These hills have caught the lightning in its flight,
Caught colors from the skies of day and night
And shine with shattered stars and suns; they hold
Dyed yellow, red and purple, blue and gold.
Red roses seem within their marble blown,
A painted garden chiseled in the stone;
The rose and violet trickling through their veins,
Where they drop brilliant curtains to the plains—
A ramp of rock and granite, jeweled and brightening,
Like some great colored wall of lightning!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay, possibly the most gifted of the younger lyricists, was born February 22, 1892, at Rockland, Maine. After a childhood spent almost entirely in New England, she attended Vassar College, from which she was graduated in 1917. Since that time she has lived in New York City. Besides her keenly individual lyrics, Miss Millay has written a quantity of short stories under various pseudonyms, has translated several songs, and has been connected with the Provincetown Players both as playwright and performer.
Although the bulk of her poetry is not large, the quality of it approaches and sometimes attains greatness. Her first long poem, “Renascence,” was the outstanding feature of The Lyric Year (1912), an anthology which revealed many new names. “Renascence” was written when Miss Millay was scarcely nineteen; it remains today one of the most remarkable poems of this generation. Beginning like a child’s aimless verse it proceeds, with a calm lucidity, to an amazing climax. It is as if a child had, in the midst of its ingenuousness, uttered some terrific truth. The sheer cumulative power of this poem is surpassed only by its beauty.
Renascence, the name of Miss Millay’s first volume, was published in 1917. It is full of the same passion as its title-poem; here is a hunger for beauty so intense that no delight is great enough to give the soul peace. Such poems as “God’s World” and the unnamed sonnets vibrate with this rapture. Magic burns from the simplest of her lines. Figs from Thistles (1920) is a far more sophisticated booklet. Sharp and cynically brilliant, Miss Millay’s craftsmanship no less than her intuition saves these poems from mere cleverness.
Second April (1921) is an intensification of her lyrical gift tinctured with an increasing sadness and disillusion. Her poignant poetic play, Aria da Capo, first performed by the Provincetown Players in New York, was published in The Monthly Chapbook (Harold Monro, England); the issue of July, 1920, being devoted to it.