Love's Old Sweet Song

FATAL INTERVIEW--Edna St. Vincent Millay--Harper ($2). Now that Elinor Wylie is dead, Edna St. Vincent Millay has become by popular acclamation the foremost U. S. poetess. But Elinor Wylie had an unmistakably individual style; Edna St. Vincent Millay is distinguishable from the ruck of modern poets only by the uniformly high plane of her language, the clarity of her line. Like most of her fellows she is lyrical (i. e. plaintive). In this book of 52 sonnets love is all her plaint. Most tell of love lost, losing, or going out by the window; a few are hortatory:

When we are old and these rejoicing veins Are frosty channels to a muted stream, And out of all our burning there remains No feeblest spark to fire us, even in dream, This be our solace: that it was not said When we were young and warm and in our prime, Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead, Sleeping away the unreturning time. O Sweet, O heavy-lidded, O my love, When morning strikes her spear upon the land, And we must rise and arm us and reprove The insolent daylight with a steady hand, Be not discountenanced if the knowing know We rose from rapture but an hour ago.

The Author. Once mistress of a style faintly flippant, almost Dorothy-Parkeresque. Edna St. Vincent Millay has settled into seriousness. Still young (39) but not so young as she was, her line, her bobbed hair, tip-tilted nose have begun to "date." A Vassar girl, married (to Eugen Jan Boissevain), a Pulitzer Prize winner (1922), she has sought poetry and ensued it in many a book. Four years ago she wrote the libretto to Deems Taylor's opera, The King's Henchman, got as much praise as he did. Other books: Renascence and Other Poems, Figs from Thistles, Aria da Capo, The Buck in the Snow.

*This version not one of the "recognized" translations last month made legally importable (by commercial houses) into the U. S.

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