Edna St. Vincent Millay’s lyrical poem "The Spring and the Fall” is a part of her 1922 collection The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems. The poem is a lyric poem because it’s short and expresses personal feelings. Millay’s female speaker shares her account of love, using a relationship to demonstrate how love arrives and departs in tiny ways. The poem presents love as melancholy and short-lived and links to Millay’s other poems about the painful impermanence of love. In "Sonnet 74” from Fatal Interview (1931), Millay refers to love as an "extreme disease,” and the speaker describes her heart as "crumbled to the side.” Millay’s forceful attitude about love, as well as her documented love affairs that inevitably flamed and fizzled, informs "The Spring and the Fall.” As Millay wrote in her diary when she was around 20 years old, "I do not think there is a woman in whom the roots of passion shoot deeper than in me” (Rapture and Melancholy, Yale University Press, 2022). "The Spring and the Fall” is not the most well-known work among the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet’s canon, but it aptly represents her acute passion and her talent for tying modern themes to traditional, musical forms.

Poet Biography

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, February 22, 1892. Her mom, Cora, divorced her undependable dad, Henry, early in Millay's life and raised Millay and her two younger sisters with the help of family members. Without support from Henry, Cora worked as a nurse to provide for her daughters. Like her mom, Millay was strong and independent. Behaving more like a normative boy than a stereotypical girl, Millay received the nickname "Vincent." A champion of the arts, Cora encouraged her children to express themselves. As a young teen, Millay published poems in the magazine for children, St. Nicholas. In 1912, an anthology, The Lyric Year, published Millay’s poem "Renascence.” The poem received much praise and attracted the attention of many people, including Caroline B. Dow—the head of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) Training School in New York. Dow helped find the money for Millay to attend the prestigious all-women's college Vassar.

At Vassar, Millay wrote and acted. She had romantic relationships with other students and almost didn’t graduate as she flaunted the rules and left campus without authorization. However, at the last minute, Vassar’s president, Henry Noble MacCracken, changed his mind and let Millay graduate and avoid "any dead Shelley’s” on his "doorstep” (quoted in Holly Peppe, "Millay at Steepletop”).

After Vassar, Millay moved to a bohemian part of New York City: Greenwich Village. In 1917, she published her first book of poems, Renascence and Other Poems. She also acted in The Angel Intrudes—a play by socialist Floyd Dell. The two had an affair, but in 1918, America charged him with sabotaging its role in World War One. Soon, Millay and poet Arthur Davison Ficke began a romantic relationship. As Nancy Milford writes in her biography of Millay, Savage Beauty (Random House, 2001, "[S]he slept with men and women and wrote about it in lyrics and sonnets that blazed with wit and sexual daring that captivated the nation.”

In 1920, Millay published A Few Figs from Thistles. A year later, she put out Second April, and, in 1922, she published The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems. A year after that, Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The same year, Millay married a wealthy importer, Eugen Boissevain; the couple bought a farm in Austerlitz. Boissevain took care of the farm and the domestic chores as Millay wrote and traveled. Aside from publishing books, Millay published in distinguished magazines like Vanity Fair. Her husband didn’t stop her from forming romantic relationships with other men, including the editor of Poetry magazine, George Dillon—the inspiration for the sonnets in Fatal Interview.

Millay led a dynamic political and personal lives. In 1927, she protested the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The two faced charges of killing a shoe company paymaster in Massachusetts. A fair amount of people, including Millay, believed the evidence against them was weak, and their radical views were why they were confronting the death penalty. Years later, as World War Two approached, Millay inveighed against isolation and encouraged America to join the war and defeat the Nazis.

During her life, Millay maintained a prolific work schedule—publishing and giving readings at a furious pace. She drank often and labored to the point of exhaustion. In 1950, a year after Boissevain died, Millay, finished proofreading translations of Latin poetry, fell down the stairs in her Austerlitz home and passed away.

Poem Text

Millay, Edna St. Vincent. "The Spring and the Fall.” 1922. American Poems.

Summary

The title, "The Spring and the Fall,” indicates the subject of the poem: the seasons of spring and fall. First, the poem centers on spring. During spring, the speaker and her "dear” (Line 2) walk together along a road. There are black trees due to the wet bark. The speaker’s beloved breaks a "bough of the blossoming peach” (Line 5). To get this growing peach was challenging, as it "was out of the way and hard to reach” (Line 6). Thus, the speaker's love did something laborious for the speaker's benefit: This was a romantic gesture.

In Stanza 2, the poem pivots to "the fall of the year” (Line 7). Once again, the speaker and their "dear” (Line 8) walk together on a road. Instead of black trees with wet bark, there are now "raucous” (Line 9) crows. The crows were so noisy that the speaker continues to hear their "trill” (Line 9) to this day. Unfortunately, the speaker’s dear no longer performs romantic tasks like breaking a hard-to-reach branch of fledgling peaches. The relationship has turned antagonistic. The man laughs at what she "dared to praise” (Line 11) and finds "little ways” (Line 12) to break her heart.

The final stanza ties together the two seasons. The speaker believes there’s "much that’s fine to see and hear” (Line 15) in spring and fall—whether it’s dripping bark or calling crows. Pivoting from seasons to love, the speaker declares that what "hurts” (Line 17) isn’t how love comes and goes but how it departs "in little ways” (Line 18). The tiny aspects that cause love to disappear bring the speaker pain.