Text 32

If I should sleep with a lady called death

get another man with firmer lips

to take your new mouth in his teeth

(hips pumping pleasure into hips).

Seeing how the limp huddling string

Of your smile over his body squirms

Kissingly, I will bring your every spring

Handfuls of normal little worms.

Dress deftly your flesh in stupid stuffs,

Phrase the immense weapon of your hair.

Understanding why his eye laughs,

I will bring you every year

Something which is worth the whole,

An inch of nothing for your soul.

3.6 The Jazz Age glitz

Many poets wrote sonnets in the 20^th century occasionally, yet the form was mostly used by authors to express the deepest of emotions, love. The sonnet has remained essentially a love song. Another poet who felt deeply and was able to craft a beautiful sonnet, Edna St.Vincent Millay (1892—1950), belongs to American literary pantheon of the most turbulent times.

She began as a lonely voice of social rebellion in the Jazz Age of the twenties. Probably it was all just the infatuating zeitgeist, but even while attending Vassar College Edna Millay liked to play the role of the young rebellious poet and she enjoyed baiting school authorities. One time she even dared Vassar's president to expel her. The president wisely refused explaining, "I don't want a banished Shelley on my doorstep". Edna's first book, having a meaningful title, A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), made her an instant success, with a great number of readers. Small wonder her little epigrams came to be instantly popular.

FIRST FIG

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends —

It gives a lovely light!

Straightforward was her attitude to the creative process. Millay explained to a friend, "A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the public with his pants down".Millay used traditional verse forms in the expression of simple, strong emotions. Her later poetry is marked by greater social consciousness but shows less lyric power. The Murder of Lidice (1942) is a ballad written for radio. Millay's mastery of the sonnet form is best illustrated in Collected Sonnets (1941) and Collected Lyrics (1943). The thoughts in her poetry are rarely original or complex, but because some of them were unfamiliar to many Americans, she acquired a reputation for novelty and vitality.

In her sonnets, Millay has no desire for modernistic appearances. She was unlike the experimental modernists; she is lyrical and romantic. Millay was one of the "new liberated women". She wanted freedom: freedom in thought and freedom in love. She "sings" about this new feedom in bittersweet songs that always, somehow, seem old-fashioned. But the message is not in the least outmoded. Sometimes she is pretty hard and − shall we say? − somewhat feministic. Just like many of the young tough women of today, she is hard on men who lack real respect and sympathy and understanding. Okay, let's hear her voice (Text 33).