Garden of verses

Edna St. Vincent Millay8217;s poetry and her home are all set to be restored

Edna St. Vincent Millay8217;s poetry and her home are all set to be restored
The staircase looks innocent enough, three narrow steps up to a landing, turn left, 11 more steps up to the second floor of this farmhouse called Steepletop. 8220;Are these the stairs, where8230;?8221; asks the visitor. 8220;There8217;s only one set of stairs in this house,8221; replies Peter Bergman, acting as guide.

Sometime in the dawn of an October morning almost six decades ago, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay tumbled down these stairs. Her neck was broken, and she had died as fiercely and adamantly as she had lived. Her death at 58 extinguished an incandescent chapter in American literature. In 1920 when she came here, Millay was one of the most famous women in the US, not just for her work, but also as a bohemian who predated the sexual revolution of the 1970s.

8220;She was a rock star,8221; said Bergman, executive director of the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society. Addicted to morphine and alcohol, and never far from the next cigarette, Millay had gone into physical, emotional and creative decline years before her death. She was beginning to write brilliantly once more after weaning herself off the dope and the grief of the death of her husband, Eugen Boissevain, the year before she died.

The house is imbued with Edna from top to bottom. In the drawing room, there8217;s her Steinway piano. The kitchen still contains the modern breakfast bar and counters. In her bedroom there8217;s her collection of handbags, her wool socks. In the bathroom, her monogrammed towels still hang. On the table in her library is a yellowed copy of The New York Times from April 24, 1950.

Millay had a deep knowledge of the natural world. She had a large fruit and vegetable garden. She named her farm after a beautiful pink flowered native spirea called steeplebush.

Up on a hill, is Edna8217;s cabin. A plain cedar structure, it measures 10 ft by 17 ft and contains a wood-burning stove, two lamps, two small desks and chairs, and sheaves of notepaper. Edna8217;s alarm clock sits on one of the desks. Her normal routine was to have breakfast in bed, work in bed, get up, do some gardening, take lunch and then retire to the cabin where she would write such works as Fatal Interview, her collection of sonnets inspired by her affair with the young poet George Dillon.

Mine the Harvest, a collection published posthumously, was penned in this cabin, as was The Murder of Lidice. She later wrote that it was bad poetry and had caused her a breakdown. Poet J.D. McClatchy wrote, 8220;In their day, her poems startled readers with their edgy candour.8221;

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Bergman is trying to restore the property and her reputation. He is confident that her star will rise again. Not least because of a recent incident. A man came here with his girlfriend. 8220;She felt she couldn8217;t die without first seeing where Millay wrote,8221; he said, 8220;There were these kids, 23-24, soldiers who had just been assigned to Afghanistan. This is what they wanted to see.8221;
_Adrian Higgins, LATWP