No Dead Shelleys on My Doorstep

A Poetry Tale about Edna St. Vincent Millay, told by Hello Doggo.

Vassar College, around nineteen sixteen. A small redhead is working her way through the rulebook, breaking most of it. Edna Saint Vincent Millay. Vincent, to her friends.

The college president, Henry MacCracken, told this one fifty years later. Students could skip classes by sending in a sick excuse. One morning, Vincent sent in hers. By ten o’clock he saw her from his office window, trying to kick out the light in the chandelier on top of the Taylor Hall arch.

A remarkable recovery.

He could have had her expelled. He didn’t. As MacCracken put it, he didn’t want any dead Shelleys on his doorstep. Shelley, remember, was thrown out of Oxford. Her answer is the line to keep. On those terms, she said, I think I can continue to live in this hell-hole.

That’s an old man’s memory, fifty years on. Take it with a pinch of salt.

What’s on paper is her senior year. In her final weeks, she stayed out of town overnight with friends, forgetting, she told her family, that she’d already lost her privileges. She was suspended, and she wrote home that the faculty had taken away her part in Commencement. Her classmates protested, and she was allowed to graduate after all.

A few years later she summed up her whole philosophy in four lines. My candle burns at both ends. It will not last the night. But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends, it gives a lovely light.

She’d started on the chandeliers.