I once memorized an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem she wrote about how her life would feel so meaningless after her husband died that nature, which was far more his realm than the poet’s, would continue uninterrupted but robbed of its light and grace. The poem begins:
“There will be rose and rhododendron
When you are dead and under ground;
Still will be heard from white syringas
Heavy with bees, a sunny sound;”
I repeated it to myself line by line, committing it to memory stanza by stanza until I reached the final lines, the punchline that conveys of the poet’s sadness.
“Oh, there will pass with your great passing
Little of beauty not your own,—
Only the light from common water,
Only the grace from simple stone!”
To be clear– I was a fourteen year old whose only relationship had lasted for two weeks and ended when I gave my boyfriend to my friend Nicole because I could sense she liked him more than me. But there was something about Millay’s poem Elegy Before Death that was a deeply appealing (if maybe morbid) model for what love could be.
Through bearing passive witness to her husband’s love of nature and gardening, even if that witness is manifested only through the changing of the flowers by her writing desk, she can write about noticing the “may-weed and the pig-weed,” “the tamaracks” and the “white syringas,” and think of her husband. When he is gone, her world is transformed, but through all this random knowledge, through his way of seeing the world, he is still with her.
-Zoe Dubno