Poetry

MAKE BRIGHT THE ARROWS--Edna St. Vincent Millay--Harper ($1.75).

Last month Edna St. Vincent Millay was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She plans to spend the coming winter--as if in an attempt to holystone an overstuffed literary position--verse-pamphleteering about current events. The lyrics she has written in 1940 forbode Millay-things probably to come.

In Make Bright the Arrows Millay lashes out at the warring world like a lady octopus caught in a whirlpool. Giving her native impetuosity and her Vassar graduate's well-educated illusions and disillusions free play, she writes her verses mostly in three ill-assorted styles:

1) The freewheeling literary classicism which once made many college-bred Americans think that Millay had come to join them carrying spring breezes in her heels and the Pantheon in her head:

The gods are patient: they are slaves

of Time

No less than we, and longer, at whose call

Must Phoebus rise and mount his dewy

car,

And lift the reins and start the ancient

climb;

Could we learn patience, though day-creatures all,

Our day should see us godlier than we

are.

2) Fancy doggerel--written, as Millay advises her readers, "in Passion and in Deep Concern"--or, more accurately, in a Terrible Sweat:

Oh, God, let not the lovely brow

Of Freedom in the trampled mud

Grow cold! Have we no brains, no

blood . . . ?

3) The "heightened speech" of much modernistic verse:

I never was one to go to war against the

weather, against the bad conditions

Prevailing, though prevailing for a long

time, the sullen spring,

The ugly summer grey and cold;

"Summer will bud"; I said; "Autumn

do the blossoming;

Winter curtail a year without fruitions;

I, starving a little, await the new bounty

as of old."

I have gone to war, I am at war, I am

at grips

With that which threatens more than a

cold summer;

I am at war with the shadow, at war

with the sun's eclipse,

Total, and not for a minute, but for all

my days.

Under that established twilight how

could I raise

Beans and corn? I am at war with the

black newcomer.

There are a few such patches of emotional clarity in Make Bright the Arrows. But the book as a whole represents Millay's unwitting attempt to pay off her literary debt to War. War alone could make disillusions such as hers come true.

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