An ancient gesture
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “An Ancient Gesture” was first published in 1949, the year her husband died and one year before she died. It appeared in volume 66 of “The Ladies’ Home Journal” and was subsequently included in her posthumous 1954 collection “Mine the Harvest”.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on 22 February 1892 in Rockland, Maine, US, and she died on 19 October 1950 in Austerlitz, New York, US, at the age of 58.Poet and playwright, Millay was a renowned social figure and noted feminist in New York City during the Roaring Twenties and beyond. She wrote much of her prose and verse under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd. Winning the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her poem “Ballad of the Harp-Weaver”, she was the first woman and second person to win the award. Highly regarded in her lifetime, she was described by critic Edmund Wilson as “one of the only poets writing in English in our time who have attained to anything like the stature of great literary figures”.
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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.