Poetry Challenge Day 4: How Art Greets the Day

Welcome to the Poetry Challenge

A poem can lift the spirits and nourish the soul.
This week, let’s all learn one together!

Now that we’re back on dry land, headed home on the subway with empty pockets and heavy eyelids, a wave of contradictory feeling washes over us. We’re happy that it happened, but we’re sad that it’s ending.

(Just beginning for you? It’s not too late to join our Poetry Challenge. Start on Day 1, and continue at your own pace.)

Bliss and loss go together. This is an old idea in poetry. “Recuerdo” can be classified as an aubade — from “aube,” the French word for “dawn,” it rhymes with “Oh, God” and denotes a song whose singer ruefully greets the new day after a night of passion. The three stanzas track the arrival of morning. We see the first light:

We marvel at the blazing sunrise:

And finally we face the prospect of a weary morning commute:

It’s a modern poem with ancient roots, going back at least to the troubadours of the Middle Ages.

The aubade flourishes wherever lovers try to cling to a few more moments together before the sweet sorrow of parting. Romeo and Juliet, at the end of Act III in Shakespeare’s play, recite an aubade for two voices as the sky pales and the lark sings at the end of what will be their only night together. Romeo says, as he prepares to depart:

Juliet tries to forestall the encroaching day by insisting that the lark is really a nightingale.

The stakes aren’t always life and death, but the rising sun often casts a shadow of sorrow on a romantic scene. The loss is part of what fuels the romance: We can’t smile because something happened without sighing because it’s over.

The 17th-century English poet John Donne — one of Millay’s favorites — was a master of the aubade. Poems like “The Good-Morrow,” “The Sun Rising” and “Break of Day” are full of ardor, disappointment and unabashed horniness:

He asks these questions in “Break of Day,” which happens to be made up of three six-line stanzas of couplets, just like “Recuerdo.” This is not a very common form in English; the best-known examples come from the Renaissance — from Donne, the Elizabethan sonneteer Sir Philip Sidney and the poet and composer Thomas Campion.

Millay, an assiduous reader and enthusiastic quoter of poetry, was surely familiar with their work. It’s no accident that the courtly, archaic phrase “good morrow” springs to the lips of her ferry riders as they greet the old woman at the end.

The Renaissance’s old love language — the naughty puns, the sighs of longing and strategies of seduction, the paeans to the beauty of beloveds masked by fanciful Greek and Latin names — had grown obsolete long before Millay’s time. But the urge to suspend complex feelings in the medium of poetry never gets old. Modern poets fill the old vessels with fresh insight, looking at the pains and pleasures of love from new angles.

In the poetry of Donne and his contemporaries, the speaker of the poem is almost always a man, with women as implicit audience and explicit objects of desire. Millay and her contemporaries, writing in the era of women’s suffrage and changing sexual mores, brought a jolt of realism to the language of romance. Millay’s sonnets reckon with the end of love not in a spirit of swooning regret but with brisk, sometimes cynical acceptance.

She was part of a cohort of American women poets whose work dispensed with both Victorian attitudes about love and post-Romantic lyric conventions. In that vein, Louise Bogan’s “Leave-Taking,” from 1922, is a modern aubade that is also a break-up poem. The lovers, “waking from the sleep of each other,” seem to agree that they would be better off apart. The inevitability of separation is what allows them to see love as “perfect.”

Poetry is not the only form to reckon with the passage of time in this way. Movies love a ticking clock, and every generation has its own cherished all-nighter. The baby boom remembers “American Graffiti”; millennials love “Superbad.” But the perfect cinematic aubade is the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise,” in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet on a train leaving Budapest and wander through Vienna until the sky goes wan. (To see Hawke’s reading of “Recuerdo,” click here).

The flip side of the aubade’s desire to stop time in its tracks is the urge to rush toward the future, to grab hold of time before it passes. The aubade finds its counterpart, its anticipated answer, in the carpe diem poem. That’s Latin for “seize the day” — YOLO, you might also say — and it’s the oldest pickup line in the book. In 17th-century English poetry, lustful swains (often shepherds, for some reason) are always beseeching their beloveds to “make much of time” and get busy.

Andrew Marvell, whose couplets we glanced at earlier this week, sums up the argument: Let’s be merry now; we’ll be too tired later.

The charm of “Recuerdo” is that it chronicles both the seized day (or night) and the weary aftermath, rolling time up into a ball of happy memory. See how much of it you remember in today’s game. Carpe diem!

Today’s task: The final stanza

Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis, Nick Donofrio and Joumana Khatib. Additional editing by
Emily Eakin, Tina Jordan, Laura Thompson and Emma Lumeij. Design and development by Umi Syam and
Eden Weingart. Additional design by Victoria Pandeirada. Video production by Caroline Kim.
Additional video production by McKinnon de Kuyper. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg. Illustration
art direction by Tala Safie.

Illustrations by Hannah Robinson.

Audio of “Recuerdo” from “Edna St. Vincent Millay in Readings From Her Poems” (1941, RCA); accompanying
photograph from Associated Press.