18 pages • 36 minutes read
Edna St. Vincent MillayA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The history of the burial casket shows an evolution from the simple pine box to elaborate constructions of rare wood, precious metals, and silk linings. The speaker in “Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls” conjures the image of a coffin that would put the ancient Egyptians to shame. It is made of silver and “cool with pearls” (Line 1). It is encrusted with “red corundum” (Line 2)—rubies—“or with blue” (Line 2) —sapphires. Pearls, rubies, and sapphires occur organically in nature. They are mined and harvested for their beauty and rarity and are given value by people. In this poem, the love of “other girls” (Line 3) is enshrined like the dead in elaborate caskets, such as the one the speaker proposes, and hidden. For all the embellishment, the casket remains a reliquary, a place for the dead, whose ebullience cannot even be admired once it’s in the ground. The speaker refuses the box and chooses, instead, the simple pleasures nature has to offer and that nature alone can construct—a yellow cowslip and a skirtful of ripe apples. These living things will also die, eventually. However, uninterred and unadorned, they will have the chance to grow and ripen to their full potential, as can she.
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
An Ancient Gesture
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Conscientious Objector
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Ebb
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I Will Put Chaos Into Fourteen Lines
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Lament
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Song of a Second April
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Spring
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Courage That My Mother Had
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Spring And The Fall
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Travel
Edna St. Vincent Millay