Commentary on Edna St. Vincent Millay's 'Spring'
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Possibly one of the most original seasonally-themed poems I have ever seen, and on a certain level out of character from the rest of Millay's work, Spring is both a philosophical and an artistic triumph. The imagery, cadence and depth of this poem set it apart from other commentary regarding the first season. Here, as in her other poems, Millay expresses herself as a profoundly Christian writer; here, however, her expression of faith is more refined than in many of her other poems. There are a variety of points of interest within this work:
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
On the surface the poem seems openly cynical or despondent at the very least; it is very reasonable to envision the opening line to be hostile, almost Shakespearean in nature--an aside against the futility of living. When taken in context, however, with the rest of the poem and the underlying moralist bent of Millay's philosophy one may see this segment as a segue into the moral treatise to come later in the poem.
Why is beauty, to Millay, insufficient? One notices in reading the rest of Millay's work that she is an intrinsically transcendentalist writer whose chief pleasure seems to rest in her appreciation of nature. Spring appears to be the result of a crisis of faith, a reevaluation on the part of the author regarding her perception of her place in the world. She can no longer be given solace by the beauty of nature alone, perhaps realizing that the natural world is an impersonal and utterly unromantic force.
You can no longer quiet me. . .
One is again given the impression that whatever naive consolation Millay has found in her friendship with nature has somehow been betrayed. Some pall has been cast over her life; this has brought her to a new view of the world:
I know what I know.
What is it that Millay has come to know? She explains herself in lines 13 and 14. Taking into context her Christian worldview, it is arguable that the subtext of Spring is a rejection of materialism. The unspoken addendum to
Life in itself
Is nothing
seems to be that life requires spirituality to be full; this is a common pattern of thought within Christian philosophy. Millay, however, adds an interesting observation of her own, calling life
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
One will notice that it is an object of utility, of purpose; in neither case is life totally without significance. In this sense Millay has maintained her transcendentalism by acknowledging that the material world is a purposeful and often beautiful compliment to our internal lives. Liquid without a cup to contain it is nearly useless; you cannot climb the flaccidity of an unsupported rug. Here she departs further from the apparent fleshly mortification of her thesis; her conception of life does not incorporate the puritanical view that worldly living exists simply to present us with temptations we must deny. Life and Spirituality are complimentary halves of a functional unit to Millay, the maturation of a previous view that life is the path to spirituality. The semantics are minute, yet the resulting philosophical deviation is profound. Millay seems to have developed from the view that our experiences on earth and our appreciation of nature lead directly to the divine; this is very orthodox within the transcendentalist school. In maturation--the starkness of such realization reflected in the poem itself--generates a new philosophy in which a relationship to the divine must be present in order to 'carpet the stairway of life', that is, to make our existence complete. This subtext is underwritten by the somewhat inscrutable intervening passage, in which Millay broods that
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
It seems that Millay here utilizes the discrepancy between the most common understandings of the verb 'To be apparent'. On one hand, that which is apparent may be merely visible, a fallible perception; on the other, that which is apparent is obvious. When one dovetails the two meanings of the word one may come to the conclusion that there is only a seeming absence of death--a surface vitality, further criticized in the following lines:
Not only under ground are the brains of men
eaten by maggots.
It seems that Millay here concludes that the significance of such an appearance is nil; even if there is no bodily expiration, it is not merely in death that our identities decompose. This image has several interlocking meanings: discounting the introductory not only one is struck by the inherent bitterness, almost nihilism of Millay's accusation against the workings of the world. That such a marvelous organ as the human brain--and by her use of 'the brains of men', despite historical connotation, she seems to be referring to scholarly men--should fall to ruin and be eaten by larvae affronts her sense of the dignity of the world. It is here and particularly in the tremblingly emotional closing line that one is made aware of the true severity of Millay's revelation. Spring represents not merely a casual realization but a wrenching rearrangement of how a woman views the world--the culmination of what feels as though it were a long and bitter struggle against depression or tragedy. Millay is both enlightened and shattered--her transcendentalism has failed her. Here we are introduced to the second meaning of lines 11 and 12, that the minds of the living may be likewise consumed by maggots. This casts the poem's nature as invective against the agnostic sensualism of the transcendentalist mindset into sharp profile; Millay seems to have determined that a mind divorced from divinity must inevitably fall into decay despite all the appreciation of nature of which it is capable.
Millay's entire conception of nature has changed. Notice the language she uses in lines six and seven:
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
A transcendentalist does not observe. To observe is to detach oneself, to make a specimen of a thing. How drastic the removal from the Millay who wrote God's World! Nature is no longer a divinely ordered mandala, a path to enlightenment through sensation; instead it
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
With this staggeringly good simile, the image of which I can scarcely keep out of my head, Millay has reshaped her worldview. Nature is devoid of reason now, a blithe and uninspired force which blithers and flings its singsong blossoms across the world with neither relevance nor grace. In this shock of recognition, Millay has rebelled against her previous philosophy to such an extent that she is overtly hostile toward the world she so admired--her invective is so sharp that one may well wonder if she will ever quite recover.
I can only wonder what the spiritual struggle of Edna St. Vincent Millay was; it is obvious that she viewed herself as having transgressed in some way, as having lived in spiritual poverty; Millay was hurt, by who or what we can only speculate, and that hurt has put her beyond the consolation of
. . . the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily
And so, indeed, the whole of the world that once gave her so much pleasure.