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Aug 26, 2022 · A poem about a woman who experiences a spiritual awakening and death after contemplating the sky, the universe, and infinity. She regrets her sins, feels the suffering of others, and longs for a new life in the rain.
A poet and playwright poetry collections include The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (Flying Cloud Press, 1922), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and Renascence and Other Poems (Harper, 1917) She died on October 18, 1950, in Austerlitz, New York.
"Renascence" is a 1912 poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, credited with introducing her to the wider world, and often considered one of her finest poems. The poem is a 200+ line lyric poem , written in the first person, broadly encompassing the relationship of an individual to humanity and nature.
A person stands and looks at mountains, turns to look at a bay, lies down and screams, and gets up. This is nearly all that “happens” in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s "Renascence,” the poem that made her famous at just 20 years of age. But, over 20 stanzas, many more and much stranger events transpire. The person is wrapped in “Infinity ...
- Summary
- Themes
- Structure and Form
- Literary Devices
- Detailed Analysis
- Similar Poetry
In the first lines of the poem, the speaker expresses horrorat the boundaries of her world. It is mundane, without interest, and confining. She can even reach out and touch the sky with ease. Suddenly, the weight of infinity presses down on her, and she’s forced to feel other people’s suffering. She knows the sorrow, pain, and death of everyone who...
In ‘Renascence,’ Millay explores themes of death, faith, and rebirth. The latter is the most important theme at work in the poem, and it is integrally tied to the others through Millay’s narrative. The speaker experiences a wide range of emotions and states of being in this long poem. She’s alive, feeling confined and exhausted, then she suffers th...
‘Renascence’ by Edna St. Vincent Millay is a 214 line poem that is divided into twenty stanzas of varying lengths. The majority of these are around twelve lines in length. Millay chose to make use of a simple rhyme scheme of couplets throughout ‘Renascence.’ This means that the poem follows a rhyme scheme of AABBCC, and so on, changing end sounds a...
Millay makes use of several literary devices in ‘Renascence.’ These include but are not limited to imagery, enjambment, and caesura. The latter is a formal device that occurs when the poet inserts a pause into a line of text. This might be through manipulation of the meter or through the use of punctuation. For example, line one of stanzafour reads...
Stanzas One and Two
In the first stanza of ‘Renascence,’ the speaker begins by describing what she can see when she looks around. There are mountains, three long ones, and a wood. On the other side are three islands “in a bay.” She continues to look around her as the stanza progresses, ending where she began, looking at the horizon and seeing the “three long mountains a wood. The mountains were a barrier, keeping her from seeing any farther than what was directly in her line of sight. Before a reader can conside...
Stanza Three
As if trying to make herself feel better about her situation, the speaker considers the sky and its breadth. She decides to focus on it, but as soon as she does so, she starts to realize that it’s not “so very tall.” It has to stop at some point, creating another boundary in her life. By pointing out these natural features which contain her, the speaker is alluding to society’s containment of her own life. She’s restricted, as a young woman, and more broadly as a human being in her modern wor...
Stanza Four
In contrastto what she experienced in the previous lines, in the fourth stanza, the speaker encounters infinity. It settles down over her and forced her to scream back inside. She is starting to come to a new understanding of life, with access to “Immensity made manifold.” She got access to the “gossiping of friendly spheres,” suggesting that she is seeing into other parts of the world or even into the afterlife.
Readers who enjoyed ‘Renascence’ should also consider reading some of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s other best-known poems. For example: 1. ‘First Fig’– a short, impactful poem that addresses the poet’s own life, sexuality, and career. 2. ‘God’s World‘- depicts the wonders of nature and the value of the creations in “God’s world.” 3. ‘Bluebeard‘- a cle...
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It has consciousness—and here is one of Millay’s signal traits—she is always endowing living things with consciousness, knowing, and feeling, which makes her a brilliant forerunner of today’s ecological poetry. The tree is Millay’s speaker, and she is the tree. The “arms” of the “lads” become boughs of a tree.
Throughout much of her career, Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most successful and respected poets in America. She is noted for both her dramatic works, including Aria da capo, The Lamp and the Bell, and the libretto composed for an opera, The King’s Henchman, and for…
