Essay On Edna St. Vincent Millay's Renascence

Poetry, perhaps more than any other form of literary expression, signifies the human condition. For millennia, the simplistic complications of poetry have reflected the human behavior and summarized the meaning behind life. Few poems are more applicable to this way of thinking than Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence,” an entrancing, winding, and clinical look past the physical realm and into the murky waters of the mind. “Renascence” uses the natural world to express the interconnection across the human species and the balance required for enlightenment. Millay’s poem is centered around nature, using it to symbolize the physical realm. The third stanza begins to illustrate the difference between the narrator and the world around her. The narrator spends the third stanza exploring the world around her, and emphasizing how far this physical realm must go through lines such as “The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,” (Millay 23) and “I screamed, and –lo! –Infinity came down and settled over me.” (Millay 29-30) The narrator discovers the limits of the physical world around her, but as a spiritual being, she goes on, towards infinity. Such is

For the narrator, this is the end of her crushing sadness, but as she finds out while dead, the road that brings sadness also brings joy. Now that she cannot feel emotion anymore, the narrator begins to long for the smaller positives, such as the calming, cleansing rain that falls over her. She wishes she were back alive, so she could “kiss the fingers of the rain,” (Millay ) and “catch the freshened, fragrant breeze from drenched and dripping apple trees.” (Millay ) Where once the rain was connected to negative emotion that overwhelmed the narrator, it brings positive emotion when the negatives are removed. Millay shows that emotion is a double-edged sword, and lack of emotion is a lack of