Spring

The free-verse poem “Spring” opens American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay's third poetry collection, Second April (1921). “Spring” captured the collective grief, anger, and disillusionment people felt in the aftermath of World War I (1914—1918).

World War I claimed more lives than any previous modern war. The death toll for soldiers reached around 8,500,000. Millay eulogizes the soldiers and her optimism in “Spring.”

Millay, an acclaimed and famous poet from an early age, represented the rebelliousness and experimentation of young Americans during the 1920s. Known for her sonnets, Millay called “Spring” her first foray into the free-verse form (“Vincent Millay Reads Her Poems.” The Vassar Miscellany News, 8 Dec. 1920, pp. 1–5. Vassar Newspaper & Magazine Archive). Like the rest of her work, “Spring” demonstrates Millay's outspoken nature, political activism, compassion, and mixing of modern and traditional techniques.

Poet Biography

Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay launched into the 20th Century American literary scene as a teenage prodigy.

Her mother, Cora, gave birth to Millay in 1892 in Maine. After divorcing her husband, Cora raised Millay and her three sisters alone in poverty. Cora profoundly shaped Millay's life trajectory by introducing her to classic literature. Later, Cora told her daughter about a contest sponsored by The Lyric Year's annual anthology. Millay had fallen in love with poetry at an early age and had already published and performed her work elsewhere, but her poem “Renascence” in the November 1912 issue of The Lyric Year gained her national recognition. The exposure of her work helped her secure the funds to attend Vassar College.

After graduating college in 1917, Millay moved to New York City and eventually settled in the City's artistic hub, Greenwich Village. Millay also published her first full-length collection, Renascence and Other Poems, that year. In 1921, she published Second April and the second edition of her 1920 book, A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets. Millay's meteoric rise continued in 1923 when she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her collection The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (1922).

Millay's early collections became bestsellers. Millay's frank discussions of her bisexuality, love, life experiences, politics, and philosophical insight made her a paragon of the New Woman during the 1920s, and she earned acclaim for her magnetic live performances and political activism.

After turning down several other proposals, she married Eugen Jan Boissevain in 1923. Boissevain respected her work, arranged her speaking engagements, and pay for her frequent medical treatments. The couple eventually moved north of New York to Austerlitz in 1925 to a farm estate they named Steepletop.

She published prolifically during the next two decades. She expanded The Harp-Weaver for a 1923 reprint, followed by Poems the same year. Then came The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems in 1928, Fatal Interview in 1931, Wine from These Grapes in 1934, the narrative poem Conversation at Midnight in 1937, and Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939). She also wrote Distressing Dialogue in 1924 using the pen name Nancy Boyd and co-translated French poet Charles Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil with George Dillion in 1936.

Though fruitful for her writing, this period proved an eventful time for Millay personally. She suffered severe injuries after falling out of a car and was arrested for protesting the execution of the Italian immigrants and political radicals Sacco and Vanzetti. She even had to rewrite Conversation at Midnight from memory after it burned in a fire.

Millay also dabbled in drama, first writing and directing a one-act verse play Aria da capo in 1919. Her other plays included The Lamp and the Bell (1921), Two Slatterns and a King: A Moral Interlude (1921), The King's Henchman (1927), and The Princess Marries the Page (1932).

However, Millay's star fell during the Second World War. Previously a strong pacifist, Millay wrote poems encouraging America to join the War to defeat the Nazi threat and, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, joined the Writers' War Board where she wrote propaganda pieces against the Nazis. She completed There Are No Islands, Any More: Lines Written in Passion and in Deep Concern for England, France, and My Own Country (1940); Make Bright the Arrows: 1940 Notebook; and The Murder of Lidice (1942). Millay's mental health also made it difficult for her to write starting in 1944. Finally, the avant-garde tastes fostered by the Modernist literary movement dismissed Millay's poetry as too old-fashioned and trite. Second April and The Buck in the Snow (1950) was the last book she published in her lifetime.

Following her husband's death by stroke in 1949, Millay became depressed and addicted to alcohol enough to be hospitalized. She eventually returned to her Steepletop home and wrote Mine the Harvest. However, Millay passed from a heart attack in 1950 before the book was published. Her sister Norma published Mine the Harvest in 1954.

Many modern critics and feminists advocate her deft use of fixed poetic forms, such as sonnets, to explore women's lives. Millay Arts' nonprofit organization, located at Steepletop, continues her legacy by offering artists residencies.

Poem Text

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 that 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.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent. “Spring.” 1921. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The unnamed speaker questions why the month of April has returned. She states that the month's beauty is not enough reason to come around since she no longer feels silent awe at the blooming flowers. The following line, “I know what I know,” hints that the speaker's jaded attitude towards April comes from an insight about the month she previously did not have (Line 5).

She pays attention to how her senses interact with nature as she spends time outdoors. She feels the sun's heat, sees the crocus flower, and smells the earth. She expresses a special appreciation for the earth's scent. None of these things remind her of death.

However, the apparent lack of death makes her bitter toward April. She contrasts the surface's new growth with maggots consuming buried dead men. The speaker feels life is hollow and purposeless. She compares that feeling to that of “an empty cup” or “uncarpeted stairs” (Line 15). The speaker wryly bemoans April's joyful arrival as falsely, stupidly cheerful. It reminds her of death's inevitability.