Today’s Poem: Recuerdo

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s giddy night

New York Ferry, c. 1919 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Recuerdo

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

We were very tired, we were very merry —
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable —
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry —
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

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In a Poems Ancient and Modern guest post this past February, Aaron Poochigian writes of discerning two personae in the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950): the “passionate Romantic” and the ironic cynic whose “rapier wit,” as we’ve also noted in this space, was more or less the sum total of her contemporary Dorothy Parker’s poetic persona. Today’s Poem, “Recuerdo,” which first appeared in a 1919 issue of Poetry magazine, then in Millay’s 1920 collection A Few Figs from the Thistles, tilts toward that first persona but hints at the nascence of the second. 

It’s easy to presume that “Recuerdo” is an ecstatic poem in the Romantic vein, full stop. Look at the lines that recur at the start of each stanza: “We were very tired, we were very merry, / We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.” The bouncy tetrameter, the feminine-rhymed couplet that sets the pattern for the whole poem, the riding for the sake of riding, all point to the giddy intensity of a friendship or first romance, when the two of you are the only people in the world. You don’t have to be doing anything special to be having the most profound night of your young life. 

And yet the seeds of something else are already starting to germinate. The poem occurs in the past tense. We enter this sleep-deprived night — one trivial, magical thing after another — only as a memory, as the title indicates. This night is a thing already finished. However magical it was, it’s over. From the second word of the first line, we know this. By the end of the first stanza, the dawn has come “soon.” 

Edna St. Vincent Millay, circa 1920 (Wikimedia Commons)

Throughout, the poem is full of interesting resonances. That apple and pear of the second stanza are, on the one hand, the kind of cheap, common fruits two flat-broke young people might buy to fill up on. On the other hand, their very commonness, cheapness, and make-do-ness as a dinner might say something larger about the fruitfulness of the relationship. It’s all delicious because it’s what there is — and all too soon, it’s not even that. In that moment, those fruits, with their resonances of the Garden of Eden, and of St. Augustine’s stolen pears, hint at a decay already setting in.

The image of the sun in the last line of the second stanza is opulently beautiful, but the “bucketful of gold” drips into the sea and is lost. The couple’s open-hearted generosity in the last stanza, as they offer the remaining apples and pears to an old woman, who blesses them, is undercut by the fact that in giving her their money, they’ve kept back enough for subway fares. 

It’s a subtle kind of reservation, and an understandably pragmatic one. Yet just as the ferry of the first stanza smells of a stable, the poem’s last line has the whiff of people withdrawing, by degrees, from each other. The giving of the fruit is a first divestment. Already other people begin intrude on their brief, exclusive, ecstatic, adventure. And soon enough, rushing down into the underground, they’ll leave what’s left of the ecstasy behind. 

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