Sleeping Beauty

THE PRINCESS MARRIES THE PAGE--Edna St. Vincent Millay--Harper ($2).

In 1917 Undergraduate Edna St. Vincent Millay, precocious senior at Vassar College, finished a one-act play in verse. The Princess Marries the Page. It was her first play. While the rest of the U. S. was buckling into the machine that was to send A. E. F. divisions catapulting into France, seven Vassar girls were whispering and giggling over their parts. On the much-rehearsed night Authoress Millay played the Princess, took many a curtain call. Next year, as a real grown-up actress, she played the same part in Manhattan's arty Provincetown Playhouse. Life began to go fast for Authoress Millay. She lost the manuscript of her play, was too busy to bother about it. Thirteen years later she found it again, among some old papers. Easily most popular poetess of the U. S., Edna St. Vincent Millay could afford now to foist off on her sympathetic public almost any callow piece of juvenilia. But The Princess Marries the Page is surprisingly, delightfully neither callow nor juvenile. A Princess, "the most beautiful Princess you have ever seen." is reading in her tower retreat. A saucy page, who has climbed up to the window ledge, interrupts her by tootling on his flute. Their little flirtation is doing nicely when he confesses that he is no page but a spy. Soldiers are looking for him. When they enter he hides; the Princess is in process of lying him out of it but he surrenders himself. The King, a not really heavy parent, regretfully prepares to do his duty, when the page in time's nick disproves his spydom, proves himself a king's son.

Unlike most undergraduate poets, Authoress Millay in this trial flight kept her immortal longings strictly under control. Her airily unpretentious blank verse, never seeking to vie with Marlowe or Milton, avoids comparisons, succeeds perfectly in cloaking a little masterpiece.

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