Spirituality and Edna St. Vincent Millay's Works

The assimilation of human feeling with nature impacted the writings of Edna St. Vincent Millay throughout the entirety of her career. At an early age, on the coast of Maine, Millay had a quasi-religious experience while nearly drowning, that when written down ten years later became the foundation of one of her most staggering works, “Renascence.” The way in which Millay confronts and interacts with nature, namely the sky, is unnerving, raw, and beautiful. She transcends time and is enabled to take part in an empathetic experience with the entirety of what she perceives around her. This poem serves as a precursor to later poems that deal with the human and its counterpart in existence, nature. Over the course of her work, Millay was constantly reconfiguring her notion of God, humanity, and nature and how they were interrelated. This examination and understanding of a oneness with things is the theme found throughout her writing. In addition to “Renascence”, it is found in “Spring” as well as “Epitaph for the Race of Man.” The constant it seems is her communion with that around her in the natural world. Her offerings of interpretations and meditations on the earthly goods of nature and humanity showcase a pantheistic view of the world, in which everything equals God.

The poem “Renascence”, which garnered Edna St. Vincent Millay instant fame as a poet and allowed her entry into her life as a writer was written when she was only eighteen, ten years after a near drowning incident off of coastal Maine. The poem deals with the spiritual experience of accepting man’s suffering and offers an extended and meditative view of nature as a presence that pushes and awakens the sense of empathy in man.

The beauty of “Renas...

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...even if these connections are made by the shared experience of death. It is in this connection to larger ideas and showing then, the connections to smaller entities therein, that Edna Millay is able to project a pantheistic sensibility, even if this is in the minor chord of foreboding destruction.

The humanity that Millay is privy to in the understandings she obtains from the observation of earth, sky, season, and the cycle of existence is the paramount essence of her writing. The poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay is the poetry of evaluation of that which is shared and experienced. In each of her writings above, Millay has reconfigured the notion of nature and humanity, not as separate things existing in the same world, but rather two forces occupying each other’s space long enough that there is an indelible reference to each in the existence of the other.