Girl Called Vincent: The Life of Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay
kitchen knife and thrust it into a tree trunk The sisters were each other's best friends calling each other for decades to come by silly nicknames that came from one of their favorite childhood songs an old college tune Cora liked to sing to them There was a man who had two sons and those two sons were brothers Josephus was the name of one and Bohunkus was the other For the rest of their lives Vincent was Sefe and Norma was Hunk Kath leen became mysteriously Wump It's no surprise that all three sisters learned to sing play the piano perform and write poetry when they were very young these were Cora's passions and she shared them with her daughters as naturally as she breathed Cora's poems had appeared in New England publications and before she married she had given concerts locally advertising them as Miss Buzzell's Concerts In fact she had met handsome Henry blonde blue eyed and broad shouldered at a dance where she was one of the musicians Page 17
Even as a young child Vincent was a girl of strong emotions Edna St Vincent Millay Papers Manuscript Division Library of Congress Washington DC Cora continued to play and perform after becom ing a wife and mother and it wasn't long before her daughters started appearing with her When she sang in a quartet at the town hall in Union one February evening Vincent a few weeks shy of her fifth birth day performed a solo The little maid milking her Cow Page 18 5 pages left in this chapter
Vincent s mother Cora Buzzell Millay is shown here a year before her marriage Edna St Vincent Millay Papers Manuscript Division Library of Congress Washington DC Another time Vincent and Norma performed the cakewalk together high stepping arms akimbo to an oompah rhythm played by Cora The cakewalk was a dance made popular through minstrel shows and audiences applauded the talented little sisters strut ting their stuff I'd bend down all this in rhythm to the music Mother was playing on the piano or the organ maybe one two I'd tie Vincent's shoe Norma recalled Then we'd throw back our heads take arms and strut and cakewalk down Vincent adored her mother and wanted to do everything she did They didn't have a piano but they did have an organ Cora always keen to nourish her daughters talents taught Vincent to play even though her little legs were too short to reach the ped als The two of them spent hours together at the instrument Cora working the pedals while deter Page 19
mined Vincent eyes shining learned to make the keys sing Before Vincent was five Cora had taught the eager girl to read both music and poetry Some of the first poetry she read by herself was from Shake speare's Romeo and Juliet and difficult as the language was for a small child its beauty made her hold her breath and its fervor hit her with physical force It knocked the wind clear out of me Vincent remem C bered later It was the first time she felt what would become an increasingly familiar urgency over the years to use words to create that kind of power One of the things she would write magnificently about throughout her life was nature and her first poem was on that subject One bird on a tree One bird come to me One bird on the ground One bird hopping round One bird in his nest One bird took a rest Her poem may not have been very Shakespearean but it certainly had the mark of somebody who had been reading poetry had absorbed the concepts of rhyme and meter and knew how to use them For a girl not yet five it was a great poem Page 20 3 pages left in this chapter
