sweetest in the gale

I love so many of her poems, but I was thinking about this one recently. I love how it flips the old story of Bluebeard on its head, and turns it into a parable about the importance of not losing yourself in a relationship, a thing I don’t think Edna ever did. Edna was such a complicated personality, and sometimes I find myself thinking about how every man she ever knew fell in love with her, or about how deeply she loved people, or about how codependent she was with her mom, or about how she had some really weird internalized misogyny, or about how she was brazenly queer and poly a whole damn century before any of that was acceptable, or about how she had chronic pain and died addicted to morphine, or about how she was genuinely a kind of poet celebrity, a thing that doesn't exist anymore, or about how so many people devoted to preserving her legacy today seem intent on flattening all those interesting things about her into a kind of "saintly girl genius" image. And then I remember I don't actually know her at all, even though it feels like I do, and no-one alive now, not me or the people from the Millay society or her biographers, really know her "sought-for truth". Edna gave us her poetry and then left to "seek another place." She refused to be pinned down. She refuses to be flattened.

I miss her now that I’m done revising (for now) the play I wrote about her. But she never really leaves me alone. Anyway, here’s the poem:

This door you might not open, and you did;

So enter now, and see for what slight thing

You are betrayed… Here is no treasure hid,

No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring

The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain

For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,

But only what you see… Look yet again—

An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.

Yet this alone out of my life I kept

Unto myself, lest any know me quite;

And you did so profane me when you crept

Unto the threshold of this room to-night

That I must never more behold your face.

This now is yours. I seek another place.