For rain it hath a friendly sound

Good thing this wasn’t a full-on poetry pilgrimage. Mostly my family enjoyed fine, cool weather during our week’s vacation in midcoast Maine, and I’d planned a stop, as we drove away, in Edna St. Vincent Millay territory, just for an hour, before visiting the Farnsworth Museum. Enter heavy rain and flood warnings. I insisted on paying the park fee anyway so we could drive to the top of Mt. Battie and I could imagine Millay there, cooking up her famous early poem “Renascence.” As the plaque at the summit says, rather melodramatically and with imperfect comma usage, “At the age of eighteen, a frail girl with flaming red hair left her home in early morning to climb her favorite Camden hills where so deeply affected by her surroundings, she wrote ‘Renascence.’ The poem received Immediate public acclaim and was the inspired beginning of the career of America’s finest lyric poet.” I’m putting aside the latter assertion because I don’t think “who’s the best?” arguments are worth having, but I have to observe that Millay wasn’t so frail if she hiked that high.

I’m a Millay fan and sometime scholar, but while I’m glad “Renascence” won the young poet some prize money and a scholarship and the beginnings of fame, it’s (shh) far from my favorite of her works. The poem is full of beautiful turns of phrase (“To kiss the fingers of the rain,/ To drink into my eyes the shine/ Of every slanting silver line…”). I’m moved by her awe; I’m interested in the poem as a representation of something like a panic attack, an overwhelming physical and mental response to the largeness of the world and the pettiness of human ambition in the face of suffering. But much of the poem’s intensity strikes me as funny; I’m trying not to use the word “adolescent.” I don’t have any right to condescend to a woman who faced serious headwinds yet climbed so very many mountains.

It also struck me as hilarious that when I retraced her steps–by economy car–in the aged half of middle age, with plantar fasciitis and a pulled muscle in my back, after repeatedly shaking my head at ticket-takers who asked if I was eligible for a senior citizen discount, what met me was not “three islands in a bay” but drippy pines and a sea of fog. I could have been anywhere. Ah, the grand view from my fifty-fourth summer on the planet! There’s a poem in there somewhere.

We went on to the Farnsworth, where the views were better. Here are two paintings I found there of another poet, Robert Creeley, by his sometimes collaborators, Alex Katz and Francesco Clemente. He looks middle-aged, too, but maybe not quite ready for the senior discount.

The most poetic aspect of this trip was the grandeur of Maine’s landscape, particularly in astonishing Acadia National Park–cliffs of pink granite above blue seas!–but also on the smaller local hikes we did around our rented house in Brooklin, on the Blue Hill peninsula. Even our lodgings had a literary vibe. We got really lucky in this rental, which I chose from among Airbnb and VRBO listings with some trepidation, because it was a new offering with no previous reviews. The little house sat on a hunk of granite overlooking Wells Cove and beyond that, Eggemoggin Reach. It had an old-fashioned kitchen, nothing beyond wood planks to separate and therefore soundproof the bedrooms, plus rickety steps wherever you looked, so it wouldn’t work for everyone, but man, that view. It also had walls and walls of GOOD books; multiple desks and well-situated reading chairs; quirky art on the walls; a kiln; and a small separate cabin with no running water that was clearly used by a writer. I have no idea who the resident artists are or were–I can easily imagine people making a life on this property until the accessibility challenges became too much–but I can tell you they read history, lots of novels, and an experimental-intellectual strain of poetry, from the modernists through Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Alas, none of Millay’s “myriad magics” stood on the shelves. Sick’ning! Nay! I know not how such things can be!