{"id":100327,"date":"2017-10-23T12:00:43","date_gmt":"2017-10-23T11:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=100327"},"modified":"2017-10-16T12:17:35","modified_gmt":"2017-10-16T11:17:35","slug":"we-need-their-voices-today-18-edna-st-vincent-millay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/10\/we-need-their-voices-today-18-edna-st-vincent-millay\/","title":{"rendered":"We Need Their Voices Today! (18) Edna St. Vincent Millay"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/em><\/p>\n

This is a collection of biographical sketches showing people whose wise voices from the past can help to guide us today. All of the women and men, brief glimpses of whose lives and ideas are portrayed here, gave a high place to compassion. None of them was a slave to greed. We need their voices today!<\/p>\n

[Note from TMS editor: It will be posted one biographical sketch per week]<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

**********************************************<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The beautiful red-haired American poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), is known for her lyric poetry, but she also wrote some of the finest sonnets in the English language, combining classic form with modern imagery. Many of these sonnets are based on the emotions that she experienced in her love affairs with both men and women. However, my own favorite is a serious sequence of eighteen sonnets,\u00a0 \u201cEpitaph for the Race of Man\u201d, published in 1934, just as the catastrophe of World War II was about to engulf our planet.<\/p>\n

The basic premise of Millay’s \u201cEpitaph\u201d is that we know from the evolutionary history of life on earth, that no species survives forever. She speculates on what will be the final cause of the extinction of the human race, and concludes that Man will die by his own hand, since none the innumerable disasters that nature has thrown at us over the millennia has persuaded humankind \u201cto lay aside the lever and the spade, and be as dust among the dusts that blow\u201d. Here are a few of the sonnets from the sequence:<\/p>\n

\u201cOh Earth, unhappy planet, born to die,<\/em>
\n Might I your scribe and your confessor be,<\/em>
\n What wonders must you not relate to me<\/em>
\n Of Man, who, when his destiny was high<\/em>
\n Strode like the sun into the middle sky<\/em>
\n And shone an hour, and who so bright as he,<\/em>
\n And like the sun went down into the sea,<\/em>
\n Leaving no spark to be remembered by.<\/em>
\n But no; you have not learned in all these years<\/em>
\n To tell the leopard and the newt apart;<\/em>
\n Man, with his singular laughter, his droll tears,<\/em>
\n His engines and his conscience and his art,<\/em>
\n Made but a simple sound upon your ears:<\/em>
\n The patient beating of an animal heart.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cAlas for Man, so stealthily betrayed,<\/em>
\n Bearing the bad cell in him from the start,<\/em>
\n Pumping and feeding on his healthy heart<\/em>
\n That wild disorder never to be stayed<\/em>
\n When once established, destined to invade<\/em>
\n With angry hordes the true and proper part,<\/em>
\n ‘Til Reason joggles in the headsman’s cart.<\/em>
\n And Mania spits from every balustrade.<\/em>
\n Would he had searched his closet for his bane,<\/em>
\n Where lurked the trusted ancient of his soul,<\/em>
\n Obsequious Greed, and seen that visage plain;<\/em>
\n Would he had whittled treason from his side<\/em>
\n In his stout youth and bled his body whole,<\/em>
\n Then had he died a king, or never died.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cHere lies, and none to mourn him but the sea,<\/em>
\n That falls incessant on the empty shore,<\/em>
\n Most various Man, cut down to spring no more;<\/em>
\n Before his prime, even in his infancy<\/em>
\n Cut down, and all the clamour that was he,<\/em>
\n Silenced; and all the riveted pride he wore,<\/em>
\n A rusted iron column whose tall core<\/em>
\n The rains have tunneled like an aspen tree.<\/em>
\n Man, doughty Man, what power has brought you low,<\/em>
\n That heaven itself in arms could not persuade<\/em>
\n To lay aside the lever and the spade<\/em>
\n And be as dust among the dusts that blow?<\/em>
\n Whence, whence the broadside? Whose the heavy blade?…<\/em>
\n Strive not to speak, poor scattered mouth; I know.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems to me that although Millay’s words were extremely appropriate as a warning to humankind in 1934, they are even heavier with meaning today, when we are threatened with the disaster of thermonuclear war as well as catastrophic climate change, both self-inflicted. The cancer-like root of the problem is \u201cobsequious Greed\u201d. Please read the whole sonnet sequence yourself. Millay speaks eloquently to us over the years.<\/p>\n

\n

Edna St. Vincent Millay, eloquent poet with a deep concern for the future of humanity, we need your voice today!<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Together<\/p><\/div>\n

Contents:<\/strong><\/h2>\n

1 Saint Francis of Assisi<\/a><\/p>\n

2 William Blake<\/a><\/p>\n

3 Thomas Paine<\/a><\/p>\n

4 Thomas Jefferson<\/a><\/p>\n

5 Mary Wollstonecraft<\/a><\/p>\n

6 William Godwin<\/a><\/p>\n

7 The Marquis de Condorcet<\/a><\/p>\n

8 Thomas Robert Malthus<\/a><\/p>\n

9 Percy Bysshe Shelley<\/a><\/p>\n

10 Robert Owen<\/a><\/p>\n

11 John Stuart Mill<\/a><\/p>\n

12 Henry David Thoreau<\/a><\/p>\n

13 Count Leo Tolstoy<\/a><\/p>\n

14 Mahatma Gandhi<\/a><\/p>\n

15 Martin Luther King<\/a><\/p>\n

16 Wilfred Owen<\/a><\/p>\n

17 Albert Einstein<\/a><\/p>\n

18 Edna St. Vincent Millay<\/p>\n

19 Bertha von Suttner<\/p>\n

20 George Orwell<\/p>\n

21 Helen Keller<\/p>\n

22 We need their voices, and yours!<\/p>\n

________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>John Scales Avery, Ph.D., who was part of a group that shared the 1995<\/strong><\/em> Nobel Peace Prize<\/em><\/strong> for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network<\/a> and Associate Professor Emeritus at the H.C. \u00d8rsted Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is chairman of both the Danish National Pugwash Group and the Danish Peace Academy and<\/em> received his training in theoretical physics and theoretical chemistry at M.I.T., the University of Chicago and the University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles both on scientific topics and on broader social questions. His most recent books are Information Theory and Evolution and <\/em>Civilization\u2019s Crisis in the 21st Century<\/a> (pdf).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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