Warning: Spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay is less flowers and baby bunnies… more death and depression.
If you prefer your spring poems to be about baby bunnies and the bright hope of the future, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Spring” is probably not the flower you’d pick out of the poetry bouquet. And that is totally, 100% cool.
You’re welcome to stop and turn back now if you accidentally clicked on this. Or if some cruel friend sent you this lesson on how to utilize the grotesque in our poetry as a prank.
There are plenty of other, brighter corners of my imagination to explore, like my quirky middle grade fantasy books or my (in)Frequently Asked Questions!
For those who choose to stay and explore the dark side, we’ll have two goals today:
- Read and Understand the poem “Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
- Pick its flesh to feed our own poetry
We’ll do a deep dive into what makes the disgusting so compelling in “Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, plus I’ll share 3 quick poetry tips you can take away for your own writing!
So put yourself in maggot mode, maybe do some wormy mouth warmups, and prep your appetite.
Because today, we feast on the blood and bones of some truly raw poetry. (Too much?)
Who Is Edna St. Vincent Millay?
The poem we’re going to be leeching from in this poetry lesson is by a woman I respect and admire deeply: Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Millay was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet with an extraordinary ability to prod the raw parts of the human experience, to strike straight into the soul… and she was an active feminist!
Millay not only spoke and wrote about sexuality in an age where women weren’t supposed to talk about such things, but openly depicted her bisexuality, too! People viewed Edna St. Vincent Millay as an entirely new sort of woman.
Born in 1892, Millay spent most of her childhood being raised by a single mom, who did everything she could to foster her children’s interest in literature and support Millay as a writer; Millay’s gratitude towards her mother is obvious in much of her writing.
Me and Vincent (as family and friends called her) have something in common: I also had an amazing mom behind me as a young writer!
One of the things that makes reading Millay’s poetry today so cool is that it doesn’t sound old and dusty and dated.
Sure, the poem we’ll read today, “Spring,” was published over a century ago in 1921. But Edna’s voice sounds as raw and fresh in 2022 as it must have in 1922!
Great poetry doesn’t spoil.
Still, it’s important to know this poem’s age. Because if you don’t, you might miss something major when you read it.
So as you devour this particular little morsel of poetry, keep in mind: it was written just a few years after the end of what we call “World War I,” but Millay would have called “the Great War.” We’re only able to name it “World War I” because we’ve seen the future: we know that it was first of (too) many.
But to the people who lived it, the Great War was supposed to be the last.
See, people had been told that the Great War would be a “war to end all wars” — that everyone would live in peace after.
Of course, we all know how that turned out.
But people had hope, at the beginning. Horrible things were happening, but people could at least believe it was all for a reason.
Poetry Reading Pro Tip:
Many poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay rhyme, but “Spring” was Millay’s first free verse poem.
“Free verse” means that the poem doesn’t rhyme and doesn’t have a regular rhythm, or “meter.” So don’t worry about trying to make this sound a certain way in your head — just read it like someone is talking to you!
And in the hollow left behind when that hope died, we find today’s poem:
Spring
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
…not exactly your typical spring poem, huh?
Sit for a second and let yourself marinate in the feelings it stirred up. Try to name those feelings, if you can. Take as much time and as many rereads as you need to let yourself fully steep in Millay’s words.
And whenever you’re ready, grab the pickaxe from your Writing Toolbox and…
Let’s Pick This Poem Apart!
First off, I’ve got a question for you:
Was this poem as gruesome as you expected?
Because I have a sneaking suspicion that you have a bad feeling souring your stomach after reading… but it’s not because you’re grossed out!
If I had to name the heavy feeling sinking into my belly like a stone, I’d call it “despair.”
Yes, the bits about brains and maggots are gross. But that’s not why this poem has stuck in people’s minds for more than a century. You could write poems a million times more disgusting than this (and my students sometimes have!) But being revolting isn’t enough to make a poem resound across the ages.
Grossness should point to something greater.
So what is grossness pointing to in “Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay?
What makes maggots eating brains such a powerful image in this poem, when you could find the same exact imagery in a dollar store Halloween display?
The power here doesn’t come just from disgust. Millay is using disgust as a tool to get at something deeper: existential dread.
Some of our ugliest emotions are the most difficult to unlock; making a reader happy, or sad, or hopeful is much easier than making them feel regret, or shame, or despair, or dread.
Which isn’t a bad thing, if you think about it.
Those really deep emotions are seriously powerful drivers of human behavior.
Marketing people know this; they leverage the power of regret all the time to bypass our better reason and drive sales!
One of my favorite clothing brands uses it against me constantly: limited releases that can sell out in minutes, “helpful” emails when collections are about to be discontinued, a crowdsourced museum on Instagram reminding me of pieces I missed… I know why they’re doing this. And it still works. A buy a ton of their (admittedly, super cute) clothes.
So we don’t really want every writer to be able to trigger our rawest emotions at the drop of a hat… we just want to be one of the writers who can!
In other words:
We want to write like Edna St. Vincent Millay!
Why is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry so hauntingly powerful? What is it about “Spring” that made it stick in our souls for a century?
What is her secret??
Her secret was a hidden superpower: the ability to bridge the gap between body and soul in her writing.
This dichotomy between body and soul is one that poets, philosophers, and priests have grappled with for as long as there have been humans. And our friend Edna was a pro at dancing in that divide — at using it to her advantage.
So when she’s writing about gross things, like maggots eating brains, she’s using our bodily disgust as a tool to dig at a deeper, more hidden part of our souls.
Because the repulsion reflex is surface-level and easy to trigger; being nauseated by maggoty meat is a basic survival instinct that has kept the human species from going extinct from food poisoning before you even got the chance to read this.
And by triggering that gut reaction of repulsion, Millay has hijacked our (thankfully unmaggoty) brains.
She’s got us, readers, right where she wants us.
No matter what you were doing before — even if you were having a gay old spring picnic in the sunshine, surrounded by fragrant flowers — you’re suddenly uncomfortable. Even if you were mid-bite of your cucumber sandwiches and mini scones and whatnot, you’re now thinking about grub-infested human brains, not delicious picnic snacks.
Millay used disgust as a backdoor to sneak in and get a stranglehold on our emotions.
Edna, How Could You?
Now, don’t be alarmed, dear reader.
Because our good pal Edna hasn’t betrayed us here. She’s not hijacking our emotions to make us buy adorable dresses. She’s doing it to help us gain access to her emotions.
Remember, this is a woman who was sold the dream of a war to end all wars… and who saw that dream decay to the worst kind of suffering, to purposeless deaths. She’d witnessed the devastation of World War I; she’d seen the lives sacrificed for what ended up as empty promises.
So when she tells us that maggots are eating men’s brains, she’s talking about men she knew. And millions more. An entire generation had been slaughtered — their lives given for a wasted dream.
By painting their death in the most gruesome terms, terms that turn our stomachs and twist our guts, Millay leverages disgust to connect us bodily to the tragedy of that loss.
We’re made to physically feel the meaninglessness of it all.
See?
Told ya Millay was a master of bridging that soul/body gap!
She employs this technique in other poems, too. When history repeated itself in the form of World War II, Millay repeated herself, too. With a little less metaphor and nicety about flowers this time. “Apostrophe to Man,” which you should 100% read when we’re done here, includes the lines:
Convert again into explosives the bewildered ammonia and the distracted cellulose; Convert again into putrescent matter drawing flies The hopeful bodies of the young;
Same trick, different war.
…but how does this help us?
“Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay can teach us how to pack more of a punch into our poems. We just need to steal some tricks from the master!
The key lesson is one we’ve already touched on, but it’s one that bears repeating:
Grossness should point towards something greater.
What does that mean when we’re writing? It means that when we’re about to introduce an element of grit, of rawness, of repulsion to our work, we should know why we’re doing it.
Use disgust as Edna St. Vincent Millay did: as a tool to transfer how you feel in your soul into how the reader feels in their body.
My students are amazing.
Of course, if just wanna write gross for the sake of gross, and that brings you happiness and fulfillment, rock on! I still keep copy of such a poem written by a first grade student many years ago.
It made him happy, it makes me happy, it’s a great poem.
But if you’re not aiming for that, keeping your end goal in mind and using revulsion consciously is how you can elevate your poetry from bathroom humor and cheap horror movie effects to something that can stand the test of time.
If you want, you could even write your greater goal on a post-it note or piece of paper, and let it stare you in the face as you write:
I want to emphasize the finality and futility of soldiers’ deaths.
or:
I want readers to feel the hopelessness and lack of control of someone spiraling into addiction.
or:
I want to depict the inhumanity man can show towards his fellow man.
This way, you’ll be able to ask yourself as you’re choosing imagery:
Does this image help me achieve my goal?
You as you write
Select only the images that actually support your mission — not just the ones you think are grittiest.
3 Quick Poetry Tips from Spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Using grit as a tool, not as an ends in itself, is the main lesson here. But our girl Edna has some other tricks up her sleeve that can help you wield that tool with greater power!
1. Make the ugly uglier by including beauty.
Call it cosmic balance. Call it yin/yang. Call it whatever you want.
But the fact of the matter is that contrast works.
A negative image will be a thousand times more impactful if it’s surrounded by positive ones — that’s why the sensory details of the crocus and the fresh earth are so important in “Spring.” This poem wouldn’t hit the same way if it was just a poem about a gruesome war, not one about the beautiful sights and smells of the coming season.
Which leads us into…
2. Use the element of surprise to your advantage.
If this was your first time reading “Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, you had a very different experience with it than I did my first time: you knew the maggoty bit was coming.
I apologize sincerely if you feel cheated out of the experience of reading it thinking it was going to be your typical spring poem. If enough people contact me to yell at me, I’ll err on the side of doing spoiler alerts instead of maggot alerts in the future.
But imagine how much different this poem would be if Millay had opened with death and maggots. If she’d titled it “War Sucks, People Died for No Reason.”
Do you think it would have been as big a hit? I don’t!
Want another great Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that packs a hidden punch? Check out “The Ballad of the Harp Weaver“!
Lulling your readers into a false sense of security and using the element of surprise to your advantage is a great way to amplify the emotional impact of your words.
3. Make the comfortable uncomfortable.
Of course, the maggots eating brains bit is the most visceral part of “Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
But this poem is laden with other moments that help build our unease!
Maybe you’ve heard of the uncanny valley — an effect where us humans tend to be fine with things that don’t look human, like cats or trains, and fine with things that do look human, like (duh) humans, but not fine with things that only look kinda-sorta-mostly human, like weird cat/people crossbreeds or creepy dead-eyed train people.
Or perhaps you’re familiar with Pascal Boyer’s minimal counterintuitiveness effect, which says we remember things that slightly contradict our expectations better than we remember things that fully conform to them?
(If you’re new to both, have fun jumping down this fresh Wikipedia rabbit hole!)
Either way, the point is that we can make our poetry more impactful by slightly subverting expectations. Tweaking something comfortable and familiar to make it uncomfortable is a great way to do this!
When Millay writes “of little leaves opening stickily,” she takes the familiar, pastoral image of opening leaves, and she imbues it with an uncomfortable sensory detail: stickiness.
She follows with another potentially unpleasant tactile description: “The sun is hot on my neck.” Heat isn’t always unpleasant — “warm” is generally a positive descriptor, especially — but the close proximity of “hot” and “stickily” suggests to our brains a less-than-pleasant sensation.
“Spikes of the crocus” is another great example of Millay choosing language that puts a negative tweak on a familiar positive: instead of choosing the soft, delicate language of “blossoms,” “petals,” etc. she focuses on the harsher, weaponized description of “spikes.”
She’s putting us on edge with her word choice.
And what about the images Millay selects to stand for the emptiness of life?
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
As you might have noticed, these are simple, familiar objects we see every day, being used in a way that makes them feel hollow. Eerie. Tragic.
So you don’t always need to reach for blood and guts and gore to have an impact — try tweaking something close to home and making it uncomfortable!
Tl;Dr:
In today’s lesson, we explored why “Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay is such a stellar example of how poets use the gritty or grotesque to gain access to readers’ deeper emotions.
If we want to accomplish this in our poetry, we should know our end goal and keep it in focus when selecting the imagery we use to evoke disgust (unless we’re trying to be gross just for the sake of it!)
We also learned that, as poets, we can amplify the impact of our more gruesome imagery by:
- Making the ugly uglier by including beauty.
- Using the element of surprise to our advantage.
- Making the comfortable uncomfortable.
And…
Lesson Learned!
Congratulations! We’ve finished picking our poem clean, and added another tool to our Writing Toolbox!
Have you used the gritty and the grotesque in your poetry? How will you use what you learned today in your future writing? Share your great examples of gross in Readers Reply below!
And if you found this lesson helpful, make sure you’re signed up to the Quick Quirk so you don’t miss more fun lessons from literature in the future! Thanks for reading (and sorry if you were eating!)
Grotesquely,
Lover of Learning. Queen of Quirky.
Wordsmith of Wonderlands.
