Remember, remember the... sixth of November?

Well, I'm falling behind again. Usually this time of year, I feel so motivated. I want to take on the world. Then, the holidays come, and I spend a month and a half crying at every family event. I am the world's worst scrooge at the holidays! Birthdays, too. Well, mine anyway, I have no problem with other people's birthdays. Unfortunately, my birthday and the holidays walk hand-in-hand. This year, my birthday even falls on Thanksgiving. Double whammy! I shall learn to be grateful and thank God for all the foods that I have yet refuse to eat like turkey and ham (blech!). Wow, I think I have just gone through the how-to guide for making enemies and alienating people! On to something more uplifting than my poor attitude!

Edna St. Vincent Millay was raised by a progressive mother who asked the father to leave the family in 1899. She had two sisters. She and her sisters were raised with an appreciation of the arts, and it was at her mother's urging that she enter her poem Renascence into a contest that led to her first publication. Also, as a result of this, Millay gained instant acclaim and a scholarship to Vassar. There, she continued to write poetry, and, at the request of the Vassar drama department, she wrote her first verse play The Lamp and the Bell. She led a Bohemian lifestyle. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her fourth volume of poetry The Harp Weaver. While she did marry later in life, she and her husband maintained a sexually open relationship throughout their twenty-six year marriage. He died in 1949, and she followed in 1950. My favorite sonnet of hers is as follows:



What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts to-night, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain,
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.