The Lamp and the Bell - A Drama in Five Acts: With a Biography by Carl Van Doren

By Edna St. Vincent Millay and Carl Van Doren

Edna St. 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 skilful sonnet writers who expertly married modern attitudes with traditional forms of expression. “The Lamp and the Bell” is a fairy tale drama in five acts written by Millay for a student production at Vassar College, New York. An over-the-top melodrama complete with love triangles and accidental murder, “The Lamp and the Bell” is not to be missed by theatre lovers with a penchant for the comedic. Other notable works by this author include: “Two Slatterns and a King” and “Second April”. 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 & Co. Books
• Release date: Aug 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528790741

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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THE LAMP

AND THE BELL

A DRAMA IN FIVE ACTS

By

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

WITH A BIOGRAPHY

BY CARL VAN DOREN

First published in 1921

Copyright © 2020 Read & Co. Books

This edition is published by Read & Co. Books,

an imprint of Read & Co. 

This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any

way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd.

For more information visit

www.readandcobooks.co.uk

Written on the occasion of the

Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of

the Vassar College Alumnae Association

Dedicated to '1917'

Contents

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

By Carl Van Doren

CAST OF CHARACTERS

THE LAMP AND THE BELL

PROLOGUE

ACT I

SCENE 1

ACT I

SCENE 2

ACT I

SCENE 3

ACT II

SCENE 1—FOUR MONTHS LATER

ACT II

SCENE 2

ACT II

SCENE 3

ACT III

SCENE 1—THE FOLLOWING SUMMER

ACT III

SCENE 2

ACT III

SCENE 3

ACT III

SCENE 4

ACT III

SCENE 5

ACT IV

SCENE 1—FIVE YEARS LATER

ACT IV

SCENE 2

ACT IV

SCENE 3

ACT V

SCENE 1

ACT V

SCENE 2

ACT V

SCENE 3

ACT V

SCENE 4

ACT V

SCENE 5

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 it had the movement of a bird's flight, so had it the ease of a bird's song. The poet of this lucid voice had gone through a radiant experience. She had, she said with mystical directness, felt that she could touch the horizon, and found that she could touch the sky. Then infinity had settled down upon her till she could hear

The ticking of Eternity.

The universe pressed close and crushed her, oppressing her with omniscience and omnisentience; all sin, all remorse, all suffering, all punishment, all pity poured into her, torturing her. The weight drove her into the cool earth, where she lay buried, but happy, under the falling rain. Suddenly came over her the terrible memory of the multi-colored, multiform beloved beauty she had lost by this comfortable death. She burst into a prayer so potent that the responding rain, gathered in a black wave, opened the earth above her and set her free. Whereupon, somewhat quaintly, she moralized her experience with the pride of youth finally arrived at full stature in the world.

Renascence, one of the loveliest American poems, was an adventure, not an allegory, but it sounds almost allegorical because of the way it interpreted and distilled the temper which, after a long drought, was coming into American verse.

Youth was discovering a new world, or thought it was. It had taken upon itself burdens of speculation, of responsibility, and had sunk under the weight.

Now, on fire with beauty, it returned to joy and song.

Other things than joy and song, however, cut across track of this little renaissance. There was a war. Youth—at least that part of it which makes poems—went out to fight, first with passion for the cause and then with contempt for the dotards who had botched and bungled. Gray Tyrtaeuses might drone that here was a good war designed to end war, but youth meantime saw that it was dying in hordes and tried to snatch what ecstasy it could before the time should come when there would be no more ecstasy.