“Dirge Without Music” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay is no stranger to us at SevenPonds. While death remains a constant theme in many of her poems, her relationship with death oscillates between acceptance and repulsion—making her treatment of the subject utterly relatable. A woman of two minds about her own mortality, she was, like so many of us, incredibly interested in exploring the ever-changing tides of her thoughts on the topic. Nowhere is this indecision better illustrated than in her poem “Dirge Without Music”.

A literal oxymoron, the title describes the poem as a funeral song with no song to speak of. It epitomizes the contrast related throughout the rest of the poem. The opening lines immediately emphasize this divide as she writes, “I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. / So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind” (1-2). In her first line, and all subsequent lines, she constantly reaffirms her unwillingness to accept the finality of death by using a first person narrator. However, she then admits in the second line that her nonacceptance does nothing to change the course of time and the presence of death.

While her disavowal in the first stanza is betrayed by her words on time’s inevitability, in the second stanza this idea is reversed, and we see what it means for her to harbor her denial. The poet continues, “Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. / Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust. / A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, / A formula, a phrase remains, but the best is lost” (5-8). Drawing on another contrast, she speaks of the interment of “lovers and thinkers’ in the same breath used to tell us that their intellectual remains are a “fragment” that cannot be buried in the ground with their remains.

Credit: Wikipedia

We are brought full circle in the third stanza where she writes, “The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love, / They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses”(9-10). Unlike the last stanza, here she tells us that love and laughter are indeed buried and dispersed to give life to the earth.

Her poem concludes the way it begins as she tells us once more, “I am not resigned”(16). Just as the poet is not resigned to death, likewise no resolution within the heart of the poem reveals what ideology of grief she prefers. This inconclusiveness reflects our own hearts and thoughts in times of grief. Our emotions are often fickle and vast. We can either settle on one or choose to express several. Whatever our choice, we can use it only to help ourselves grow in the future by coping with the aftermath of the past.

Related SevenPonds Articles:

• Standing up to Death 
• Reassurance in Death
• Death as Transition