A Poem for a Thursday #236

Edna St. Vincent Millay is one of the first poets I remember reading and loving. Some weeks, when I am picking a poem, I want to go back to the tried and true instead of discovering someone new. This is one of those weeks. I pulled out my massive volume of Millay’s collected poems and spent half and hour or so paging through. I hope you enjoy the poem I finally settled on.

Yet, in the end, defeated too, worn out and ready to fall,
Hangs from the drowsy tree with cramped and desperate stem
      above the ditch the last leaf of all.

There is something to be learned, I guess, from looking at the
     dead leaves under the living tree;
Something to be set to a lusty tune and learned and sung, it well
     might be;
Something to be learned—though I was ever a ten-o'clock scholar
     at this school—
Even perhaps by me.

But my heart goes out to the oak-leaves that are the last to sigh
"Enough," and loose their hold;
They have boasted to the nudging frost and to the two-and-thirty
     winds that they would never die,
Never even grow old.
(These are those russet leaves that cling
All winter, even into the spring,
To the dormant bough, in the wood knee-deep in snow the only 
     coloured thing.)

The Oak-Leaves
Edna St. Vincent Millay