Last Sunday the NYTimes had a three page article about the dating scene in China. The article was a fascinating discussion of love in a modern age: if China is our future, it is a very love-lost place. Marriage is a commodity bought and sold. Alongside the wealthy paying for an agency to find their spouse, the working poor set up booths in parks advertising their viability as a spouse. If you happen to be an educated woman or a man without a Beijing apartment, your chances of marital bliss are slim.
Rereading Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets, I was struck by the dichotomy of the two.
Millay brought the sonnet into the modern age with her sharp wit, but with the decline in “romantic” love, will her sonnets still be true in another 100 years? I would like to think yes, that alongside all of our social media relationships (are those even real?) we will be able to maintain some semblance of romantic love. We still have time to fall in love (the classic meet-cute) and out of it as well.
I think Millay was probably asking herself the same question. The 1920s-40s were a time of cultural change not unlike our own: the economic downturn of the Great Depression, the swelling growth of cities, the technological advancements that rapidly change the job market, the revolutions occurring across the globe (a democracy or republic is no longer the only accepted forms of government). Millay, the daughter of a single mother, fled to New York City where she fought to maintain her independence–love without marriage, marriage without sacrificing her career. Can a woman really have it all?
If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again–
Read form the back-page of a paper,say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man, who happened to be you,
At noon today had happened to be killed–
I should not cry aloud-I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place–
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face;
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.
If you want to read more of Millay, her Collected Poems are arranged by type and chronology–sonnets in the back, lyrical poets in the front.
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