The Plaid Dress
An intorduction
I first heard Millay’s work in a podcast. This podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed, is a series of non-fiction essays by American author John Green. The premise is to review different facets of the human-centered planet on a 5 star scale. For example Green reviews a range of topics from Scratch and Sniff Stickers to Rock Paper Scissors to, our Capacity for Wonder. On its surface each essay is a review of title topic but they also delve very deeply into the history of each topic as well as Green’s own life. The review of Auld Lang Syne for instance is less about the old song than about a deceased friend of green’s and World War 1 soldiers and the review of Whispering is about Green’s 6 year old daughter.
The essay that features Enda St. Vincent Millay’s work is on Sycamore Trees, which is at its core, about living with depression. The poem he quotes is called Not So Far as the Forest published in 1939. I won’t read you the poem as it is quite long but I would like to read a small excerpt from Green’s essay so you understand my attraction to Millay’s work.
Green writes how his brain likes to play a game similar to young children endlessly asking “why”.
“That game is called, “What’s even the point?” There’s an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem I’ve quoted in two of my novels and will now quote again, because I’ve never come across anything that describes my depressive blizzards so perfectly. “The chill is in the air,” the poem begins, “which the wise know well and have even learned to bear. This joy, I know, will soon be under snow…. The plain fact, my brain tells me when it plays this game, is that the universe doesn’t care if I’m here. Night falls fast, Millay wrote. Today is in the past.”
After hearing this, I bought a copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s collected poems and dove in head first! Like John Green’s essays, the poems are often metaphors that express deeper human experiences. A good example is perhaps her most famous poem, the First Fig, 1920.
My candle burns at both ends;/It will not last the night;/But ah my foes and oh my friends-/It gives a lovely light
My inspiration to study Millay and her clothing is twofold. First was the photograph taken in 1914 by German-American photographer Arnold Genthe and the second is a poem published in 1939 when Vincent was 47 entitled The Plaid Dress.
Nancy Milford, in her biography of Millay, entitled Savage Beauty, quotes many letters of Vincent’s where she is describing her clothing in detail. What is clear from these letters is that Millay enjoyed clothes and often described them in detail to family and friends including the dress in the Arnold Genthe portrait, which was described as a tan linen “cutey”.
Strong sun, that bleach The curtains of my room, can you not render Colourless this dress I wear?— This violent plaid Of purple angers and red shames; the yellow stripe Of thin but valid treacheries; the flashy green of kind deeds done Through indolence high judgments given here in haste; The recurring checker of the serious breach of taste? No more uncoloured than unmade, I fear, can be this garment that I may not doff; Confession does not strip it off, To send me homeward eased and bare; All through the formal, unoffending evening, under the clean Bright hair, Lining the subtle gown. . .it is not seen, But it is there.
