“Yet here one time your spirit was wont to move;Here might I hope to find you day or night,And here I come to look for you, my love,Even now, foolishly, knowing you are dead.”

“And what are you that, missing you,I should be kept awakeAs many nights as there are daysWith weeping for your sake?And what are you that, missing you,As many days as crawlI should be listening to the windAnd looking at the wall?I know a man that’s a braver manAnd twenty men as kind,And what are you, that you should beThe one man in my mind?Yet women’s ways are witless ways,As any sage will tell,—And what am I, that I should loveSo wisely and so well?”

“Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;In my own way, and with my full consent.Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarelyWent to their deaths more proud than this one went.Some nights of apprehension and hot weepingI will confess; but that's permitted me;Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keepingRubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.If I had loved you less or played you slylyI might have held you for a summer more,But at the cost of words I value highly,And no such summer as the one before.Should I outlive this anguish, and men do,I shall have only good to say of you.”

“Strange how few, After all’s said and done, the things that areOf moment. Few indeed! When I can make Of ten small words a rope to hang the world! “I had you and I have you now no more.” There, there it dangles,—where’s the little truth That can for long keep footing under thatWhen its slack syllables tighten to a thought? Here, let me write it down! I wish to see Just how a thing like that will look on paper! “I had you and I have you now no more.”

“I shall forget you presently, my dear (Sonnet IV) "I shall forget you presently, my dear,So make the most of this, your little day,Your little month, your little half a yearEre I forget, or die, or move away,And we are done forever; by and byI shall forget you, as I said, but now,If you entreat me with your loveliest lieI will protest you with my favorite vow.I would indeed that love were longer-lived,And vows were not so brittle as they are,But so it is, and nature has contrivedTo struggle on without a break thus far,—Whether or not we find what we are seekingIs idle, biologically speaking.— Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Modern Library, 2001)”

“Be to her, Persephone,All the things I might not be;Take her head upon your knee.She that was so proud and wild,Flippant, arrogant and free,She that had no need of me,Is a little lonely childLost in Hell,—Persephone,Take her head upon your knee;Say to her, “My dear, my dear,It is not so dreadful here.”

“Lost in Hell,-Persephone,Take her head upon your knee;Say to her, "My dear, my dear,It is not so dreadful here.”