Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it. (in a letter written while she was in college) - Edna St. Vincent Millay

Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.

Still must the poet as of old,
In barren attic bleak and cold,
Starve, freeze, and fashion verses to
Such things as flowers and song and you;

Still as of old his being give
In Beauty's name, while she may live,
Beauty that may not die as long
As there are flowers and you and song.

"PIERROT: Of course not. There never was. "Moon's" just a word to swear by. "Mutton!" — now there's a thing you can lay the hands on, And set the tooth in! Listen, Columbine: I always lied about the moon and you. Food is my only lust. COLUMBINE: Well, eat it, then, For Heaven's sake, and stop your silly noise! I haven't heard the clock tick for an hour."

"Even in the Moment of Our Earliest Kiss

Even in the moment of our earliest kiss,
When sighed the straitened bud into the flower,
Sat the dry seed of most unwelcome this;
And that I knew, though not the day and hour.
Too season-wise am I, being country-bred,
To tilt at autumn or defy the frost:
Snuffing the chill even as my fathers did,
I say with them, "What’s out tonight is lost."
I only hoped, with the mild hope of all
Who watch the leaf take shape upon the tree,
A fairer summer and a later fall
Than in these parts a man is apt to see,
And sunny clusters ripened for the wine:
I tell you this across the blackened vine."