"If I should learn, in some quite casual way, that you were gone..."

Sonnet V by Edna St Vincent Millay (1923)

Today’s bit of Dead Wood, this remarkable sonnet from Edna St Vincent Millay, is one of my favorite poems. I must have read it a hundred times. She captures so aptly a specific and complicated fear: that your whole world could collapse suddenly, in some private, unspeakable way, such that you couldn’t say a word about it. It’s the fear that accompanies secret loves or lost loves. The griefs you could never claim, for fear of losing face or betraying the people around you. And it’s that lack of expression, the excruciating act of carrying on normally, that gives this poem such a pang. I hope you love it as much as I do… TM

Photo by Rosalie Gwathmey. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Sonnet V

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again—
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man—who happened to be you—
At noon to-day had happened to be killed,
I should not cry aloud—I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place—
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face,
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

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DEAD WOOD provides excerpts from the years before ideas became “content”. Some editions are serious and thought-provoking. Some are ludicrous or silly. Some are chosen just because they happened to strike us as particularly interesting.

If you have an excerpt of “Dead Wood” you’d like to suggest, email Juke at tonyajuke@gmail.com