Lesbian Poetry Retrospective Part II

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

Referred to as the poetry “It Girl” of her generation, Edna St. Vincent Millay was a prolific playwright and poet known for her sonnets on love and all of its thorny complications.

One of Millay’s first celebrated collections of poetry, A Few Figs from Thistles, included several controversial poems about female sexuality and monogamy — themes that she would continue to explore throughout her career. She later won a Pulitzer Prize for her collection The Harp Weaver.

Though Millay married a man, Eugen Boissevain, she was intimate with women and openly acknowledged her bisexuality in her work and personal life. Still, Millay struggled with her role and identity within both heterosexual and lesbian relationships, a challenge she often tried to work out in her poetry.

The following sonnet is from her collection Fatal Interview, which was published in 1931:

Night is my sister, and how deep in love,
How drowned in love and weedily washed ashore,
There to be fretted by the drag and shove
At the tide's edge, I lie—these things and more:
Whose arm alone between me and the sand,
Whose voice alone, whose pitiful breath brought near,
Could thaw these nostrils and unlock this hand,
She could advise you, should you care to hear.
Small chance, however, in a storm so black,
A man will leave his friendly fire and snug
For a drowned woman's sake, and bring her back
To drip and scatter shells upon the rug.
No one but Night, with tears on her dark face,
Watches beside me in this windy place.

May Sarton (1912–1993)

Born in Belgium, May Sarton moved to the U.S. when she was a toddler and published her first poems when she was just a teenager. From there she went on to become an incredibly prolific essayist, novelist, journalist and poet who produced 54 volumes of work in her lifetime.

Though Sarton kept details of her personal life veiled, she did write about her long-term relationship with Judith Matlock in her journals and later explored homophobia and lesbianism in her poetry and fiction.

Sarton’s journals have been celebrated for their honest, funny and complex depictions of relationships — from friends to family to Matlock — and for her analysis of the creative process.

The following poem, “The Waves,” was originally published in A Grain of Mustard Seed:

“The Waves”

Even in the middle of the silent firs,
The secret world of mushroom and of moss,
Where all is delicate and nothing stirs,
We get the rumor of those distant wars
And the harsh sound of loss.

This is an island open to the churning,
The boom, the constant cannonade,
The turning back of tides and their returning,
And ocean broken like some restless mourning
That cannot find a bed.

Oh love, let us be true then to this will—
Not to each other, human and defeated,
But to great power, our Heaven and our Hell,
That thunders out its triumph unabated,
And is never still.

For we are married to this rocky coast,
To the charge of huge waves upon it,
The ceaseless war, the tide gained and then lost,
And ledges worn down smooth but not downcast—
Wild rose and granite.

Here in the darkness of the stillest wood,
Absence, the ocean, tires us with its roar;
We bear love’s thundering rumor in the blood
Beyond our understanding, ill or good—
Listen, once more!