Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), often read as a timelessly graceful lyric poet, was also drawn to political themes: injustice, violence, human depravity, principled resistance. In 1920 she published Aria Da Capo, one of the few distinguished antiwar plays; she was engaged as citizen and writer in the movement in the 1920s to free the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. “Conscientious Objector,” published in 1934 and still read aloud at gatherings of the antiwar left, is a poem in praise of war resistance, though not of a single resister (even an invented one, like Cummings’s Olaf). Instead, it celebrates the refusal to aid and abet violence of many sorts, linking the cause of the wartime CO with other causes.
Millay grew up in Maine, went to Vassar, came to New York, met everyone, flourished, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Like Dell and Dorothy Day she worked with the Provincetown Players. Like a good many others, she found herself turning away, as World War II loomed and began and continued, from her earlier leftist and pacifist commitments, and became a passionate if not always poetically successful supporter of the Allied war effort.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle while he cinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself: I will not give him a leg up.
Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll.
I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much, I will not map him the route to any man’s door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe with me; never through me
Shall you be overcome.