Resurrestion of a Girl Edna St Vincent Millays Renascence
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
Edna St. Vincent Millay, feeling lonely and unhappy, wrote the poem "Renascence" during her eighteenth and nineteenth years while she was living on the picturesque Maine coast (Warsh 184). "Renascence" is the English version of the French word "renaissance," meaning "rebirth" or "revival." In Millay's poem, the speaker goes through a journey of life, death, and rebirth into the world. The overwhelming feelings of enclosure that the speaker feels in life lead to her yearning of death. After her demise, she realizes that the world is worthy of experiencing, and the speaker longs to be alive again. Her resurrection occurs through the recognition of the value and significance of nature, mankind, and spirituality.
The speaker in Millay's "Renascence" is trapped in the living world. The first ten lines of the poem express the "longings and frustrations of adolescence" when describing the physical attributes in the land which surround and confine the girl (Warsh 186). The speaker states that "All I could see from where I
stood / Was three long mountains and a wood; / Over these things I could not see; / These were the things that bounded me" (9-12)...