Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Wednesday
Once again I offer thanks to blogger Greg Olear for alerting me to a great poem of which I was unaware. The 1940s America that Edna St. Vincent Millay was addressing in “There Are No Islands Anymore” is disturbingly similar to our own.
Olear puts the poem in context:
A staunch pacifist during the Great War, [Millay] changed her tune after the rise of Hitler, who she correctly pegged—as all the good poets and artists did—as a despotic, genocidal madman. By the time the Nazis rolled into Poland, she was all-in on the fight for democracy, advocating for the United States to enter the war to help Britain and France. Hitler was a menace. He had to be stopped. This was not a war we could afford to sit out.
Then he notes its relevance:
What Millay felt, helplessly watching all this horror, is akin to what we feel now, a Putin’s Russia continues to bomb and drone our democratic allies in Ukraine, day after day after day, while our Hitlerian president makes Ukraine’s president beg like a dog for help we don’t provide enough of. It is infuriating. It is sad. And it is ultimately self-defeating.
Olear is irritated that such poems were dismissed as “propaganda verse” by the modernist poets of her day, not to mention whoever wrote the Millay profile piece for Poetry Foundation. Just because a poem has a political message doesn’t automatically make it bad poetry, even though it can make certain scholars of poetry uncomfortable. As Olear observes,
Aren’t all poems propaganda? Isn’t all art? If the purpose of art is not to sway, in some form or another, then what is it for? What are we even doing here?
Reading the poem in 2025, it’s hard not to think of increasingly strong hurricanes and rising sea levels brought about by climate change. And although Millay gets the story of King Canute backwards—in bidding the ocean not to rise, Canute was making the point to his subjects that he was not all powerful—it does bring to mind Trump thinking he could dictate a hurricane’s path with a sharpie. In any event, is making a powerful plea to hang together as a community.
With its memorable images and punchy lines, “No Islands” brings to mind John Donne’s “Meditation 17,” in which he declares that no man is an island. Ignore that and we are left to fight alone.
There Are No Islands Anymore
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
Lines written in passion and in deep concern for England, France and my own country.Dear Isolationist, you are
So very, very insular!
Surely you do not take offense?—
The word’s well used in such a sense.
‘Tis you, not I, sir, who insist
You are an Isolationist.And oh, how sweet a thing to be
Safe on an island, not at sea!
(Though someone said, some months ago—
I heard him, and he seemed to know;
Was it the German Chancellor?—
“There are no islands anymore.”)Dear Islander, I envy you:
I’m very fond of islands, too;
And few the pleasures I have known
Which equaled being left alone.
Yet matters from without intrude
At times upon my solitude:
A forest fire, a dog run mad,
A neighbor stripped of all he had
By swindlers, or the shrieking plea
For help, of stabbed Democracy.Startled, I rise, run from the room,
Join the brigade of spade and broom;
Help to surround the sickened beast;
Hear the account of farmers fleeced
By dapper men, condole, and give
Something to help them hope and live;
Or, if democracy’s at stake,
Give more, give more than I can make;
And notice, with a rueful grin,
What was without is now within.(The tidal wave devours the shore:
There are no islands anymore.)With sobbing breath, with blistered hands,
Men fight the forest fire in bands;
With kitchen broom, with branch of pine,
Beat at the blackened, treacherous line;
Before the veering wind fall back,
With eyebrows burnt and faces black;
While breasts in blackened streams perspire.
Watch how the wind runs with the fire
Like a broad banner up the hill—
And can no more. . . yet more must still.New life! —To hear across the field
Voices of neighbors, forms concealed
By smoke, but loud the nearing shout:
“Hold on! We’re coming! Here, it’s out!”(The tidal wave devours the shore:
There are no islands anymore.)This little life from here to there—
Who lives it safely anywhere?
Not you, my insulated friend:
What calm composure will defend
Your rock, when tides you’ve never seen
Assault the sands of What-has-been,
And from your island’s tallest tree,
You watch advance What-is-to-be?(The tidal wave devours the shore:
There are no islands anymore.)Sweet, sweet, to see the tide approach,
Assured that it cannot encroach
Upon the beach-peas, often wet
With spray, never uprooted yet.
The moon said—did she not speak true?—
“The waves will not awaken you.
At my command the waves retire.
Sleep, weary mind; dream, heart’s desire.”And yet, there was a Danish king
So sure he governed everything
He bade the ocean not to rise.
It did. And great was his surprise.No man, no nation, is made free
By stating it intends to be.
Jostled and elbowed is the clown
Who thinks to walk alone in town.We live upon a shrinking sphere—
Like it or not, our home is here;
Brave heart, uncomprehending brain
Could make it seem like home again.There are no islands anymore.
The tide that mounts our drowsy shore
Is boats and men—there is no place
For waves in such a crowded space.Oh, let us give, before too late,
To those who hold our country’s fate
Along with theirs—be sure of this—
In grimy hands—that will not miss
The target, if we stand beside
Loading the guns—resentment, pride,
Debts torn across with insolent word—
All this forgotten, or deferred
At least until there’s time for strife
Concerning things less dear than Life;
Than let, if must be, in the brain
Resentment rankle once again,
Quibbling and Squabbling take the floor,
Cool Judgment go to sleep once more.On English soil, on French terrain,
Democracy’s at grips again
With forces forged to stamp it out
This time no quarter!—since no doubt.Not France, not England’s what’s involved,
Not we, —there’s something to be solved
Of grave concern to free men all:
Can Freedom stand? —Must Freedom fall?(Meantime, the tide devours the shore:
There are no islands anymore.)Oh, build, assemble, transport, give,
That England, France and we may live,
Before tonight, before too late,
To those who build our country’s fate
In desperate fingers, reaching out
For weapons we confer about,
All that we can, and more, and now!
Oh, God, let not the lovely brow
Of Freedom in the trampled mud
Grow cold! Have we no brains, no blood,
No enterprise—no anything
Of which we proudly talk and sing,
Which we like men can bring to bear
For Freedom, and against Despair?Lest French and British fighters, deep
In battle, needing guns and sleep,
For lack of aid be overthrown—
And we be left to fight alone.
