RECUERDO We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable— But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table, We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon; And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon. We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry; And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear, From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere; And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold, And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold. We were very tired, we were very merry, We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head, And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read; And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears, And we gave her all our money but our subway fares. Edna St Vincent Millay b. 1892, Maine - d. 1950, New York State Poem written 1923
The real name of the poem is not Staten Island Ferry, but Recuerdo, which means “Memory”, because the poem is a memory of a very happy trip on the Staten Island Ferry, which goes back and forth across New York City Harbor between the tip of Manhattan and the mostly residential area of Staten Island. Many people live on Staten Island, but many other people just go there and come back on the next ferry. Or go back and forth again and again.
This poem…about a trip on the Staten Island Ferry with a Very Good Friend…is one of my favorite poems about New York City. I grew up there and made that trip to Staten Island many times, not because I had any business there, but because you were on the ferry with a friend, of one kind or another, and at night it was a wonderful trip that made you feel you were floating. Which, of course, you were.
The “shawl covered head” refers to one of the many elderly Italian women, draped in black, who used to sit and sell fruit near the subway or transit exits in Lower Manhattan to commuters coming into Manhattan. They were there even when I was a growing up in the 1950s-60s.
Edna St Vincent Millay (1892 –1950) was born in Maine but died in Columbia County, NY (about 2 /12 hours north of NYC). Her middle name, St. Vincent, comes from St Vincent’s Hospital in NYC, where her uncle’s life had been saved years before her birth, with her mother commemorating this in Edna’s middle name. Like every other literary figure or artist in the 1920s, she went to Paris but eventually returned to the United States and lived in NY for many years. She moved Upstate and appears to have been a devotee of horse racing, becoming part owner of a racing stable. She was a prolific poet and is particularly remembered for her sonnets. After a very diverse career, which got her the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, she then went on to be considered a New York City literary figure.
One of my other favorites by Edna St Vincent Millay is Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare, about the Greek ur-geometer Euclid…yes, your horrible HS geometry class and all its exhausting theorems and proofs were based on his work. It may be hard to believe, but our poet has a different view, and sees Euclid as having understood the beauty of basic forms.
Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.
Edna St Vincent Millay, 1922
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