THE ENTERNAL FLAME

Miami Herald, The (FL)
August 18, 1996
Author: MICHAEL BROWNING Herald staff writer

The original manuscript copy of the most famous poem about a candle in the English language is here, in a building filled with light bulbs, celebrating the memory of Thomas Alva Edison, who invented the electric light and made candles obsolete forever.The poem is by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and is penciled on a torn envelope, now framed and under glass in the Edison-Ford Winter Estates museum on McGregor Boulevard. Here it is, as originally scribbled down in Millay's own rapid handwriting:

My Candle
my candle burns at both ends
it will not last the night,
But ah! my foes, + oh! my friends
It gives a lovely light!

The poem became immensely popular from the moment it was published in 1920. Almost to her chagrin, Millay found herself hailed as a spokesman for her generation and the poetic voice of the Jazz Age, whose delirious excesses went from peak to peak during the 1920s, only to explode spectacularly when the stock market crashed in 1929.

It remains the most widely known and anthologized poem Millay ever wrote, though the third line is frequently misquoted. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations gets it wrong, as “But oh! my foes, and oh! my friends.” It should be “ah!” not “oh,” the first time. The hurried '+' sign in the scribbled manuscript was amplified to “and” when the poem finally saw print in 1920, in a collection called A Few Figs From Thistles. By then Millay had decided to call it “First Fig,” a title that has deservedly come unstuck.

“The postwar generation that had been disillusioned in its ideals of changing the social order and now thought only of the freedom of individuals to behave as they chose, identified immediately with the defiant spirit of . . . the soon-to-be- famous and much-quoted, or misquoted ‘candle quatrain,’” writes Millay's biographer, Jean Gould, in The Poet and Her Book. “Those four lines, beginning with the calm statement that her ‘candle burns at both ends,’ and ‘will not last the night,’ but gleefully assuring foes and friends that it ‘gives a lovely light,’ catapulted Edna St. Vincent Millay into an enormous popularity as ‘the poet laureate of the twenties,’ a dubious honor, and one she never completely lived down. She was also hailed as ‘the spokesman for the new woman’ and ‘the voice of rebellious “flaming youth.”’”

How did the poem end up here, of all places? What is a poem about a candle doing in a museum sacred to the memory of the man whose electric light bulb superseded candles?

Millay never met Edison, who was 45 years older than she, and who invented the first long-burning incandescent light bulb 13 years before Millay was even born. The great inventor was an omnivorous reader, but had little interest in poetry or poets, and scarcely any ear for music, or musical language.

When testing his first prototype of the phonograph, Edison recited Mary had a little lamb, but that was about the extent of his literary connoisseurship. Edison was so deaf that, in order to listen to piano music he had to sit beside a specially equipped piano, bite down on a metal plate specially fixed to it, and let the music's vibrations travel through his teeth, up into the bones of his skull.

When, on Oct. 22, 1879, at his laboratory in New Jersey, Edison threw the switch and lit up a vacuum bulb of glass containing a filament of rolled carbon, an era ended. Marshall Fox, a reporter for The New York Herald, described that the glass orb glowed "like the mellow sunset of an Italian autumn . . . a little globe of sunshine, a veritable Aladdin's lamp." The bulb burned for 13 1/2 hours at a level of light equal to 30 candles.

By 1882, parts of Lower New York were lit with Edison electric lights, powered by big dynamos in refitted warehouses on Pearl Street, three blocks west of the Fulton Fish Market. Poor, Bohemian Greenwich Village was probably one of the few remaining outposts of candlelight and kerosene lamplight. Electricity was taking over the city.

It was young Charles Edison, not Thomas Alva Edison, who is responsible for acquiring the poem and donating it to the museum. Charles Edison had just dropped out of MIT and gone to work for his famous father, but the young man found his dreary office job at Thomas A. Edison Inc. a bore. Edison began spending his evenings in New York's Greenwich Village, frequenting salons and coffee shops where poets and artists gathered. One restaurant he liked was named “Romany Marie's.” Millay had moved to New York in 1913, with her mother and sister. She was only 21, but had already won fame with her first long poem, “Renascence.” She was a striking young woman with a wide mouth, green eyes and red hair that floated around her face in a nimbus.

“One night in 1915 or 1916 I was showing my future bride around Greenwich Village,” the younger Edison recalled. “We visited Romany Marie's place on the third floor of a building near Sheridan Square -- and there came across Edna St. Vincent Millay, her sister and Peggy St. John. We all sat together in a booth sipping Turkish coffee and chatting.

“The room was lighted by candles, one of which was on the table in front of us held by a large cork used by fishermen to float fish nets. Suddenly Edna exclaimed: 'Oh, I have just thought of something -- anybody got a piece of paper?' I fumbled around in my pocket and found an unused envelope.

“Edna wrote something on it and gave it back to me. I read it aloud to the rest. Everybody thought that it was good. She asked for the envelope again and wrote some more lines on the opposite side. We all thought that good, too. I asked her if I could keep the envelope as a souvenir of the evening and she said, 'Certainly -- it's all yours.’

“That is the story of the envelope and ‘My Candle Burns at Both Ends.’”

Judging from Charles Edison's account, the poem was written in two parts. Millay “wrote something” on the envelope, then asked for it back, then “wrote some more lines.” The first pair of lines are pretty enough, but scarcely noteworthy. It is the second couplet that gives the poem its whole point: The poet does not care that the candle will be shortly consumed. The double light it gives is worth its foreshortened life.

This theme of brief brilliance is as old as literature. It begins with the choice of Achilles in The Iliad (ix. 410 ff):

My mother Thetis, the silver-footed goddess, told me
That a double fate bears me endward to death;
If I remain, fighting before the city of the Trojans
My hope of homecoming dies with me, but my fame shall be eternal.
But if I turn homeward to my beloved fatherland
The prize of glory shall be lost, though my life span be long . . .

A.E. Housman, a poet and classical scholar, gave modern voice to this old thought in his well-known “To an Athlete Dying Young.”

Smart lad, to slip betimes away,
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

“A short life but a merry one,” is the sentiment; but no one has expressed it quite so epigrammatically and defiantly as Millay. Drawing perhaps on Shakespeare's Macbeth (“Out, out, brief candle!”) Millay asserts that the short life, lived to the uttermost, is better than a long, sensible, measured existence.

The very next poem in the collection, which became nearly as popular as the candle quatrain, says:

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

Shining impermanency is superior to drab durability. Millay took up the theme again in a third poem, Midnight Oil, in the same collection:

Cut if you will, with Sleep's dull knife,
Each day to half its length, my friend,
The years that time takes off my life,
He'll take from off the other end!

And that is more or less what happened. Millay lived to be 58, but her best work was written early in her life, in the 1920s and 1930s. She plunged into causes passionately, championing the innocence of the two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti before they were executed in 1926, writing propaganda poems urging America to take up arms against the Nazis and Japanese in World War II. These poems, published in Huntsman, What Quarry? and Make Bright the Arrows, damaged her reputation. Critics called them crude and jingoistic. Millay retreated into alcoholism and had a nervous breakdown in 1944. She died in 1950.

“She was sometimes rather a strain, because nothing could be casual for her,” wrote Edmund Wilson in a postscript to his book on the literary scene in the 1920s and 1930s, The Shores of Light. As a young man he had been madly in love with Millay and had proposed marriage to her unsuccessfully.

“I do not think I ever saw her relaxed, even when she was tired or ill. I used to suppose that this strain of being with her must be due to my own anxieties, but I later discovered that others who had never been emotionally involved with her were affected in the same way . . . It was partly that she was really noble, partly that she was rather neurotic, and the two things (bound up together) made it difficult for her to meet the world easily,” Wilson recalled.

Charles Edison eventually gave up his vagabonding in Greenwich Village and dutifully worked for his father's company for the rest of his life. He served as governor of New Jersey from 1941-44 and died of a heart attack in 1963. He never seems to have met Millay again, after that candlelit evening.

Thomas Edison died in 1931, age 84, hard at work to the very end on a method for extracting synthetic rubber from goldenrod. His long, inventive life lacked poetry, but its vast results -- the light bulb, the phonograph, the moving picture, the alkaline battery and thousands of other patents -- makes Millay's notion, that short lives are brighter and better than long ones, seem faintly silly. Indeed, we can hear Millay's voice today, thanks to phonograph recordings she made in the 1940s: Edison immortalized her, without even knowing her.

At 10 p.m. on Oct. 21, the day of Edison's funeral, electric lights were dimmed all over the United States in his honor. He was called the “Genius of Light.” The New York World- Telegram ran a cartoon showing the angel of death extinguishing a light bulb beside the bed in which Edison lay, eyes closed.

A light bulb, not a candle.

Section: TROPIC
Page: 12
Dateline: FORT MYERS
Copyright (c) 1996 The Miami Herald