Millay, Edna St. Vincent (2)

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Millay, Edna St. Vincent:

"Sit in the valley white with mist

Like islands in a quiet bay

Jut out from the shore into the mist

Wooded with poplar dark as pine

Like points of land into a quiet bay.

(Just in that way

The harbor met the bay.)

"Stricken too sore for tears,

Inland, remembering the islands and the seas lost sound

Life at its best no longer than the sand peep's cry,

Tilling an upland ground!

"A quarter of a century later Edna Millay was living in England as World War II approached. She wrote and published an extraordinary book of poems called 'Brighten the Arrows,' an expression used by the English yeoman centuries earlier when war preparations occurred. In this book she disclosed her poet's vision of the future, in which the ages-old strategic significance of the natural physical isolation of the British Isles-- lying as unsinkable ships commanding all"