Dawn Reader: Just Walk Away, Millay ...?

Remember that old song, "Just Walk Away, Renee"? It was released in July 1966 by a group called The Left Banke (here's a YouTube link to it). That was the summer I graduated from Hiram College, the summer I found out that the Aurora (Ohio) Schools would hire me to teach at their Aurora Middle School, the summer my parents moved to Drake University, where both Mom and Dad would teach, the summer my younger brother had graduated from James A. Garfield HS in Garrettsville, Ohio, and would head off to Harvard ...

The song reached #5 on the U. S. charts. See full lyrics below ...

I thought of that song (just now) only because, well, it sort of fit with what I want to talk about today. There was a story in the New York Times this week, a story about the final home of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), who died in her remote farmhouse in Austerlitz, NY, after a fall down the stairs. She'd been drinking.

Millay has "walked away" a couple of times. She was once one of the most notable poets in the country--and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. But by the time I was in high school and college, she had pretty much been flying under the cultural radar. She did not appear much (if at all) in literary anthologies my teachers used. Even her name sounded a little ... weird. Until you learn at the "St. Vincent" was the name of the hospital that had saved an uncle's life. She liked "Vincent'--and that's what her intimates called her.

Anyway, she remained in the shadows until 2001 when two major biographies of her appeared--Savage Beauty (by Nancy Milford) and What Lips My Lips Have Kissed (by Daniel Mark Epstein; the title is the beginning line of one of her great sonnets*). I reviewed them both for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and, doing so, read a lot of Millay. And got hooked. Visited key spots in her life. Memorized a fistful of her poems.

Joyce and I have been several times to Steepletop, the name of that home in Austerlitz.

And that home is what the Times story was all about. (Link to the story.) It seems the property is quite costly to maintain--and it looks as if the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society may have to close it. (It's been open to the public in recent years.)

That would be a sad, sad day.

I would guess, of course, that literary sites are hardly the magnets they once were. For obvious reasons. Shakespeare's place in Stratford is probably safe (for the nonce?), but others? I would guess that many survive only because of some very dedicated folks who realize--as I have learned--that there is really nothing like standing on the ground where that writer has stood. Joyce and I have spent decades visiting literary sites, and I always feel, when we arrive, that I am standing, in a way, on holy ground.

Millay and a number of her loved ones are also buried on the property--beneath rough boulders in the woods. It's very moving to walk there, to see those stones, to remember the opening lines of Millay's poem about her deceased mother:

The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.

I recited these lines for Joyce's mother and for my mother at their respective memorial services.

Anyway, that Times story saddened me. And I thought today I'd just post here some pictures from the several trips Joyce and I have taken there--all in the hope, of course, that Millay will not, once again, "walk away."