On “First Fig”
JoEllen Green Kaiser
Much of Millay’s work of the early
1920s seems on its surface more like the modernist “Spring” than the sentimental “Song of a Second April,” both
from Second April. Most strikingly, Millay attacked the
sentimental construction of absent love in A Few Figs From
Thistles and to a lesser extent in Second April. Her
most famous poem, after all, does not mourn absent love but rejoices
in love's impermanence:
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!
While this “First Fig” marked
Millay’s break from traditional sentimentality, however, it did
not necessarily signal her embrace of modernism. In contradistinction
to the modernist creed of impersonality enunciated by Eliot,
Millay’s poetry remains personal. Her attitude toward love may
not be that shared by her nineteenth-century predecessors, but
she does share with them a belief in the centrality of love for
poetry.
JoEllen Green Kaiser, “Displaced Modernism: Millay and
the Triumph of Sentimentality” in Millay at 100: A Critical
Reappraisal. Diane P. Freedman, ed. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1995; 33.
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