Of Candles and Things Like That

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!

She had always wanted to write that poem. It was one of her all-time favorites, and that was saying a lot because she had read a lot of poetry. She liked ithis one in particular because it didn't take mortality seriously. It seemed like the author was choosing to laugh in the face of darker thoughts and to put her faith in both a small, fragile thing like the flame of a candle and the need to enjoy whatever time one is given. That was pretty profound, even though nowadays poets don't tend to make their verses rhyme, so people might laugh at it. 

The lady definitely had had attitude, and she liked that. Attitude can hide a lot of things that the rest of the world doesn't need to know.

However, there was that one problem with the poem: it had already been written. She had arrived too late and now had to figure out what her options were, if there were alternatives. Naturally, she hadn’t the slightest intention of plagiarizing the author. Edna St. Vincent Millay, who had been born in Rockland, Maine, on the Atlantic coast, had earned the right to it by burning that candle. 

She pondered her predicament. Not Millay’s, because the poet no longer had to face any predicaments, not since 1950, although she had suffered quite a few before that. Her own predicaments. She had to figure out what to do with a poem she could only read or recite, but wanted desperately to imitate. She also wondered if poetry always had to come from pain, and maybe it did, perhaps it should be called paintry? 

No, that word was worse than silly, it made no sense, sounded like a misshapen cross between a kitchen closet and something used in art. It was a ridiculous word and she wouldn’t be caught dead as its creator. At the same time, she was concerned that there had not yet been enough tragedy in her own life to be able to produce writing anywhere near to the equivalent of Edna St. Vincent Millay's. Edna, who as a little girl wanted to be called Vincent and whose teacher had made fun of her for it when he actually should have been reluctant to call her Edna (not a pretty name at all).

She would need to give some more thought to how she could be more like the writer from Rockland who had been introduced to life through poverty. If Edna would just let her, that was. She wondered if a glass of something strong-spirited would help, as she'd heard it had helped many writers. Would alcohol help her own flame burn brightly? She wasn't entirely convinced, nor was she all that interested in the bottle method. 

She sat stiffly at her desk, elbows bent, head resting on open palms, hoping for inspiration.

After an uncertain amount of time, a window opened, or perhaps it was a door. Something had opened, it seemed, something that had been closed up until a little while ago. She was forced to open her eyes and look up because, well, not looking would have caused something in her to burst. If not all of her, at least some important part - a vein, a brain lobe, a heart, a knee or a tear. Maybe even her whole body would self-destruct if she didn’t pay attention to the opening. She didn’t think she would like that last possibility very much.

The opening allowed something to enter:

The world stands out on either side

No wider than the heart is wide;

Above the world is stretched the sky,—

No higher than the soul is high.

The heart can push the sea and land

Farther away on either hand;

The soul can split the sky in two…

What was happening? The poet she admired was now pushing words down her throat and outward, through routes that were unmappable. To go from a tiny flickering flame to the vast and open world was disconcerting, was it not? Yet the poem was asserting that the heart could and would measure it? More impossibility. After all, a heart can only measure its own beats. It cannot go further than the chest inside which it is located. It can never be as wide as the poem suggests, although it often, unfortunately, bursts. 

Suddenly she was afraid of Edna, who not only had entered, but also seemed to be reading her mind, making her think about internal explosions. Despite what she had realized about her need to look out, away from herself or explode, she didn’t actually want to become a mass of smithereens. Her body was confusing her; her mind was a maelstrom. (Thank you, Poe, for that word.)

That chaos was something she anxiously wanted to avoid. She didn’t want her soul - if, in fact, she had one - to cause the sky to break in half. When the sky splits, awful things can happen. It can fall (she was familiar with the plight of Chicken Little), lightning can strike, it can even rain. An unbroken sky was always preferable. Edna was telling her she had the power to tear it apart. That was a little more than she had been hoping to achieve when she started with Millay's "First Fig" poem, the one without fruit but with a laughing candle that could ward off friends and enemies.

Why would a heart want to push sea and land away? (They were both lovely places to be.) And why would a soul want to harm the sky, break it in two? (Although there was violence in many people, that was true.)

She needed to rethink things, perhaps. Tone Edna down a bit, soften her sharp edges, trim the ragged ones away, ones she'd learned maybe when she lived in the island of that name off the coast of Maine. She should try to think about the future, maybe create a positive image for herself, a safer environment, one where her body would not compete with sky, sea, or land and definitely not go around breaking things. Breaking parts of her body, the way poor Edna had. Bits and pieces.

Millay could be funny at times, although it was not a happy type of funny. Yes, perhaps a bit of humor would help. She could make up some characters, create a place with magical creatures. Fairies, nymphs, beings like that. Pretend she was a child again without immense thoughts of things bursting and burning.

It was not going to be easy, because Edna seemed incapable of leaving her alone. Because something more filtered in at that very moment. It wasn't clear what opening it (she) had used, but it was there. There was more of something that hadn't been there previously.

Was it her talking or was it the poet with a tragic life who was still burning the double-ended candle? A candle that would never have a proper holder because a wick is not intended to burn on both top and bottom. It would have to be held until the hand burned too. The question came with a smirk: 

What should I be but a prophet and a liar,

 Whose mother was a leprechaun, whose father was a friar?

 Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water,

 What should I be but the fiend’s god-daughter?

Everybody knows a man of the cloth has no business creating offspring, but a child under water sounded to her like the mermaid who fell in love with a knight and was shunned by her people. She had read about that legend in a story by a Galician writer and knew that star-crossed lovers (especially the women) would always meet a tragic end. Was Millay talking about herself or simply writing about a legend?

She knew the answer, because she knew the rest of the poem, "The Singing-Woman from the Wood's Edge." It was too serious to be funny or for children. Yes, the poet seemed to nod and then there was a reply:

With him for a sire and her for a dam,

What should I be but just what I am?

Not exactly a comforting thought. Logical, though.

She was feeling very lost. It was impossible to shake the webs from the words and impossible to pull things onto a page where they could be ordered, straight lines in black and white. What had entered had been like a haze at the beginning, something that had seeped in while the candle had been burning. Now the haze was foggy and the fog was turning to icy cotton and nothing was clear. Sounds were rolling in and over her, definition was dying and with it her hopes for a poem that could illuminate her thoughts. Her own poem, not Edna's.

Dark, Dark, is all I find for metaphor;

All else were contrast,—save that contrast's wall

Is down, and all opposed things flow together

Into a vast monotony, where night

And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life,

Are synonyms. What now—what now to me

Are all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers

That clutter up the world? You were my song!

Edna had written that, she thought, but now she was no longer certain if the poor girl from Rockland, Maine knew she was writing her poem. The poem by the woman who would have been Millay if she could have. Without the tragedies and broken body, of course. She had only sought the poetry, not the suffering.

That didn't mean things weren't painful. And the web was warming now, as if somebody were holding it close to the candle. A candle that was very warm but songless.

Cut if you will, with Sleep’s dull knife,

Each day to half its length, my friend,—

The years that Time takes off my life,

He’ll take from off the other end!

She couldn't stand it any longer. There was nothing left of her that wasn't Edna, her body, her voice or her aching, damaged pen. An instrument of torture.

She was through with the woman, wanted nothing more to do with her. Looking at the desk in front of her, she grabbed the first utensil she found and plunged it, deep.

There! It was over. 

Either she, Edna, or the candle had won, but it didn't really matter.