Aria Da Capo: A Play in One Act

By Edna St. Vincent Millay and Carl Van Doren

“Aria Da Capo” is a 1920 play in one act by American poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950). Divided into three parts, it is a expressionist morality play featuring the young shepherds Thyrsis and Corydon, artist Pierrot, a young woman called Columbine, and stage manager and the Masque of Tragedy, Cothurnus. A thought-provoking play not to be missed by fans and collectors of Millay's seminal work. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) was an American playwright, Pulitzer Prize-winning lyrical poet, and feminist activist. One of the most celebrated poets in American history, Millay is hailed as the twentieth century's most skillfull sonnet writers who expertly married modern attitudes with traditional forms of expression. Other notable works by this author include: “Two Slatterns and a King” and “The Lamp and the Bell”. Read & Co. Books is republishing this classic play now in a new edition complete with a biography of the author by Carl Van Doren.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Aug 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528790598

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in 1892 in Rockland, Maine, the eldest of three daughters, and was encouraged by her mother to develop her talents for music and poetry. Her long poem "Renascence" won critical attention in an anthology contest in 1912 and secured for her a patron who enabled her to go to Vassar College. After graduating in 1917 she lived in Greenwich Village in New York for a few years, acting, writing satirical pieces for journals (usually under a pseudonym), and continuing to work at her poetry. She traveled in Europe throughout 1921-22 as a "foreign correspondent" for Vanity Fair. Her collection A Few Figs from Thistles (1920) gained her a reputation for hedonistic wit and cynicism, but her other collections (including the earlier Renascence and Other Poems [1917]) are without exception more seriously passionate or reflective. In 1923 she married Eugene Boissevain and -- after further travel -- embarked on a series of reading tours which helped to consolidate her nationwide renown. From 1925 onwards she lived at Steepletop, a farmstead in Austerlitz, New York, where her husband protected her from all responsibilities except her creative work. Often involved in feminist or political causes (including the Sacco-Vanzetti case of 1927), she turned to writing anti-fascist propaganda poetry in 1940 and further damaged a reputation already in decline. In her last years of her life she became more withdrawn and isolated, and her health, which had never been robust, became increasingly poor. She died in 1950.

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ARIA DA CAPO

A PLAY IN ONE ACT

By

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

WITH A BIOGRAPHY

BY CARL VAN DOREN

First published in 1920

Copyright © 2020 Read & Co. Books

This edition is published by Read & Co. Books,

an imprint of Read & Co. 

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from the British Library.

Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd.

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Contents

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

By Carl Van Doren

PERSONS

ARIA DA CAPO

Scene: A Stage

AUTHOR'S NOTE

ON THE PLAYING OF ARIA DA CAPO

AUTHOR'S NOTE

SUGGESTIONS FOR THE PRODUCTION OF ARIA DA CAPO

SETTING

PROPERTIES

COSTUMES

CHARACTERS

EDNA

ST. VINCENT MILLAY

By Carl Van Doren

The little renaissance of poetry which there have been a hundred historians to scent and chronicle in the United States during the last decade, flushed to a dawn in 1912. In that year was founded a magazine for the sole purpose of helping poems into the world; in that year was published an anthology which meant to become annual, though, as it happened, another annual by another editor took its place the year following. The real poetical event of 1912, however, was the appearance in The Lyrical Year, tentative anthology, of the first outstanding poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Who that then had any taste of which he can now be proud but remembers the discovery, among the numerous failures and very innumerous successes which made up the volume, of Renascence, by a girl of twenty whose name none but her friends and a lucky critic or two had heard? After wading through tens and dozens of rhetorical strophes and moral stanzas, it was like suddenly finding wings to come upon these lines:

"All I could see from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood;

I turned and looked another way,

And saw three islands in a bay.

So with my eyes I traced the line

Of the horizon, thin and fine,

Straight around till I was come

Back to where I'd started from;

And all I saw from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood."

The diction was so plain, the arrangement so obvious, that the magic of the opening seemed a mystery; and yet the lift and turn of these verses were magical, as if a lark had taken to the air out of a dreary patch of stubble.

Nor did the poem falter as it went on. If