To the Life of the Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod

4 | Edmund Wilson's Cape Cod Poetry

4 : EDMUND WILSON’S CAPE COD POETRY y father enjoyed writing poetry, and he practiced the art with great technical expertise. He can best be described as a gifted amateur who wrote poetry , mostly occasional, over the span of his lifetime . Much of his serious poetry was collected and published in Night Thoughts (, reissued ), where we find four short lyrics and two longish narrative poems dealing with Cape Cod themes. Here is the first lyric, “Provincetown,” written during a visit to Provincetown in : provincetown We never from the barren down, Beneath the silver lucent breast Of drifting plume, gazed out to drown Where daylight whitens to the west. Here never in this place I knew Such beauty by your side, such peace— These skies that brightening imbue With dawn’s delight the day’s release. Only, upon the barren beach, Beside the gray egg of a gull, With that fixed look and fervent speech, You stopped and called it beautiful. Lone as the voice that sped the word!— Gray-green as eyes that ate its round!— The desert dropping of a bird, Bare-bedded in the sandy ground. To-night, where clouds like foam are blown, I ride alone the surf of light— M As—even by my side, alone, That stony beauty burned your sight. The poem, the author informs us in his essay on Edna St. Vincent Millay (collected in The Shores of Light, ), evokes his memories of Millay , dating back to the summer of , when he visited her in the rented cottage behind Longnook Beach in Truro. The first two stanzas suggest a Provincetown land/seascape; they imply a shared past experience that would never be repeated. Daybreak comes peacefully, and sensuously. In stanza three the viewpoint changes, from the sky with its “drifting plume” to ground level, the “barren beach,” which echoes the “barren down” (dune) of line one. “You,” here Millay’s surrogate, has in the real event stopped to admire a seagull’s gray egg lying in the sand. The poem’s “I,” Wilson’s surrogate, has not shared his companion’s ecstatic reaction to the egg, to him merely the “desert dropping of a bird.” He takes note of her predatory nature: “Gray-green [the egg] as eyes that ate its round.” The clouds return in the last stanza, while “I” remains alone with the woman’s memory conjured up by “the surf of light.” But, the last two lines suggest, she was “alone” even when they were together, when “[t]hat stony beauty burned your sight.” The poem reflects Wilson’s longing for, and frustration with, his elusive first lover. “Cape Cod,” a sonnet, appears in the “Poets, Farewell” () section of Night Thoughts. Here where your blue bay’s hook is half begun, I find you fled on those mad rounds you make— As if with sleepless demons on your track Yet lodging with the daughters of the sun— Pursuing still that high romantic mood Through flight from love to love, from friend to friend; While she who dwells there sovereign to the end Draws now her final strength from solitude. —Yes, moored in a shadowy room I have seen that shape— Who once by sleepless winds herself was sped— She haunts me here in mind’s and time’s despite— The last gray clouds and pale gold of the Cape— The scent of sweet-fern crushed beneath my tread, As once I smelt it through the smothered night. edmund wilson’s cape cod poetry :  The theme and tone closely resemble those of the preceding lyric. The subject could well be Millay again. The octave suggests that her persona has been tormented by “sleepless demons,” while recklessly pursuing “that high romantic mood” in art and love. Lines seven and eight speak of her having finally achieved self-sufficiency and a “final strength from solitude.” The sestet conjures up her presence and merges it with a Cape sunset, “The last gray clouds and pale gold of the Cape—” and the “scent of sweet-fern . . . As once I smelt it through the smothered night.” Cape Cod’s sights and smells serve as a frame for the image of a haunted and haunting woman. The next lyric of interest, in the section “Elegies and Wakeful Nights” (s), evokes Provincetown and its outer shore, Peaked Hill, where Wilson spent the summer of  with his second wife, Margaret Canby. This blue world with...