When I was much younger, I used to memorize poetry. I think if I were born a few years earlier I could have been a beatnik. Or centuries earlier, a pre-Raphaelite heroine, crying over lost love. Needless to say I was never the girl dancing on the table. After a couple of margaritas I would be reciting sad poems or falling asleep in a corner somewhere.

One of my favorite poets was Edna St Vincent Millay. I loved her poems. They were often tragic and melancholy. I remember finding a book of her "Collected Poems" when I was a young teen. It was 737 pages of poetry, and cost about $7.50. It seemed like a small fortune at the time. I loved that book and still have it.

Later I read the biography "Savage Beauty" by Nancy Milford. It was very thorough and probably told me more than I wanted to know about her life. She was born in 1892 and started writing as a young girl. She liked to be called Vincent. She went to Vassar on a full scholarship after being encouraged by someone who heard her reading her poems. She was a very bohemian and free-spirited  feminist and lived in Greenwich Village in the 1920's. She married in 1923. It was a very open marriage. They both had many public affairs but stayed together until his death in 1949. Vincent was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923. She also wrote a few short stories, although I've never read any. I do think I've read all of her poems. She died in 1950 at the age of 58 after a fall down the stairs at her home "Steepletop" in New York.

Along with many others, I recently saw The Odyssey. My reason for seeing it was probably different than most. I wanted to hear more about the story of Penelope. The movie had a bit of a different slant than this poem I loved and memorized when I was fourteen.

AN ANCIENT GESTURE

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron: 

                Penelope did this too,         

    And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day

And undoing it all through the night;

Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;

And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,

And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years, 

Suddenly you burst into tears;

There is simply nothing else to do.

And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:

This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,

In the very best tradition, classic Greek; 

Ulysses did this too.

But only as a gesture,-a gesture which implied

To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.

He learned it from Penelope...

Penelope, who really cried. 

                                                          Edna St. Vincent Millay                      

Just a note: Ulysses is the Roman translation of the original Greek name Odysseus. Same husband