Audiobook · read by volunteers
À Few Figs from Thistles
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
Read by Kristin Hughes (1974-2021) · 23 chapters · 21 min
About the book
Within a few pages, this slim collection announced a new poetic voice. A Few Figs from Thistles brings together twenty-three poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and it opens with the famous lines about a candle burning at both ends. The poems are quick, witty, daring and often irreverent, with a gift for compressing a whole attitude into a few lines. They speak of love, independence and the pleasures and costs of living freely, and they do it with a musical ease that makes them memorable. Many are only a few lines long, others a little more extended, and a number include small surprises of tone. In under half an hour, you can hear a young poet in command of her art. Twenty-three poems, each a separate recording.
Introduction
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was an American poet who became one of the best-known voices of the 1920s. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923, and she was admired for her skill with traditional forms such as the sonnet and for her frank, modern subject matter. A Few Figs from Thistles first appeared in 1920 and was expanded in 1922; she was already known, and it added to her public reputation as a poet of spirit and independence.
The book is a collection of twenty-three poems, among them First Fig, Second Fig, Recuerdo and Thursday. Their tone varies from playful to wry to tender. Millay often takes a small moment or a brief thought and shapes it into a finished poem, using rhyme and metre with a lightness that makes them seem effortless.
For a first-time listener, the collection works well as a sampler. The poems are short, so there is no need to commit a long time, and each one is its own file. You can listen straight through or dip in at random.
This is a single-author collection read by a LibriVox volunteer and lasts about twenty-five minutes. It will interest readers of modern American poetry and anyone who likes verse that is clever, musical and unafraid. Since each poem is a separate recording, you can pick out the ones whose titles attract you or listen to them all in order. Hearing them read aloud brings out their music and their wit.
Public domain
Edna St. Vincent Millay died in 1950: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text