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[Say what you will, and scratch my heart to find]

1892 –

1950

Say what you will, and scratch my heart to find
The roots of last year’s roses in my breast;
I am as surely riper in my mind
As if the fruit stood in the stalls confessed.
Laugh at the unshed leaf, say what you will,
Call me in all things what I was before,
A flutterer in the wind, a woman still;
I tell you I am what I was and more.

My branches weigh me down, frost cleans the air.
My sky is black with small birds bearing south;
Say what you will, confuse me with fine care,
Put by my word as but an April truth,—
Autumn is no less on me that a rose
Hugs the brown bough and sighs before it goes.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 24, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892. A poet and playwright poetry collections include The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (Flying Cloud Press, 1922), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and Renascence and Other Poems (Harper, 1917) She died on October 18, 1950, in Austerlitz, New York.

About Edna St. Vincent Millay

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About this Poem

“[Say what you will, and scratch my heart to find]” is the eighth and last sonnet featured by Edna St. Vincent Millay in the anthology American Poetry, 1922: A Miscellany (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922). In 1927, The English Journal published “Edna St. Vincent Millay,” an essay by poet and literary critic Edward Davison. Davison praised and criticized Millay, stating, “Miss Millay’s metrical facility is usually clever enough to conceal her verbal lapses from a hasty reader. Her best work is written in an unfaltering, precise, and slightly epigrammatic style that weighs every word even when, as occasionally, it forgets to weigh the phrase.” Despite Millay’s popularity and winning a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (Flying Cloud Press, 1922), Davison concluded his essay with: “[Millay’s] work is not the poetic expression of some more or less consistent scheme of values, like the work of Mr. A. E. Housman, Mr. Robert Frost, Mrs. Browning […]. It has no scale to measure the world. Lacking that, a poet cannot even approach greatness.” In 1943, Millay won the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America for her lifetime service to American poetry.

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More by this poet

Love is Not All (Sonnet XXX)

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; 
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink 
And rise and sink and rise and sink again; 
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, 
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; 
Yet many a man is making friends with death 
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. 
It well may be that in a difficult hour, 
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, 
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power, 
I might be driven to sell your love for peace, 
Or trade the memory of this night for food.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

1931

Sonnet III: “Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring”

Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring,
And all the flowers that in the springtime grow,
And dusty roads, and thistles, and the slow
Rising of the round moon, all throats that sing
The summer through, and each departing wing,
And all the nests that the bared branches show,
And all winds that in any weather blow,

Edna St. Vincent Millay

1917

Souvenir

Just a rainy day or two
In a windy tower,
That was all I had of you—
Saving half an hour.

Marred by greeting passing groups
In a cinder walk,
Near some naked blackberry hoops
Dim with purple chalk.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

1923

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[Say what you will, and scratch my heart to find]

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