"Read History: So Learn Your Place in Time" (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

3/30/2017

Read history: so learn your place in Time
And go to sleep: all this was done before;
We do it better, fouling every shore;
We disinfect, we do not probe, the crime.
Our engines plunge into the seas, they climb
Above our atmosphere: We grow not more
Profound as we approach the oceans floor;
Our flight is lofty, it is not sublime.
Yet long ago this Earth by struggling men
Was scuffed, was scraped by mouths that bubbled mud;
And will be so again, and yet again;
Until we trace our poison to it's bud
And root, and there uproot it: until then
Earth will be warmed each winter by man's blood.

8 Comments

Sergio Avendano

4/2/2017 20:00:44

Here the poet is quite basically saying what i think most of us think about the world, its a bad place. Its just as she says we might read and read about how countless ancestor generation feared and improved a lot on it, but ultimately like a dead man once said "With great power comes great responsibility" and "we are doomed to repeat our ancestors mistakes". And by the looks of it they weren't wrong about it.

Monica Orduna

4/16/2017 11:02:24

After reading this short poem, I think that the poet somehow shows more into how we are killing Earth and also us. At the beginning of the poem she states the phrase "learn your place in time" and for me she is saying how we have to learn from the mistakes that the other generations did in the world and know that in the actual years we can change a lot if we learn more about it. Somehow, she not only writes directly to the reader, she also uses metaphors to create the bad image of what the humans are doing into their own race. In this times when a lot is going on with the topic of war and conflicts within diversity, the last line of the poem have to be put in top because of the strong message it has, "Earth will be warmed each winter by man's blood"

laura bern

4/26/2020 13:40:16

This is NOT Millay’s original Poem!! Shame on you!
Her original poem is sublime and gentle but profound. This one is not.
Make sure you do your proper attributions!

Kay

4/26/2020 14:43:25

Dear Contributor:
I do not know why you are so angry; but I can tell you that what made you so angry is unwarranted. This is in fact one of Millay's sonnets in which she meditates upon time's effect on the physical, romantic, and historical conditions of her life and, in general, humanity.

Bird Williams

5/9/2020 18:01:49

"Vincent" wrote this poem in response to the trial and subsequent execution of now-pardoned Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti. This was a major cause célèbre of her time.

My high-school American Literature textbook (from the late 1970s/early 1980s) included this poem and this context for it. It's the first poem I ever memorized for a class.

Bird Williams

5/9/2020 18:13:56

Here's the original, as published in Harper & Row's Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay

SONNET CLXX

Read history : so learn your place in Time ;
And go to sleep : all this was done before ;
We do it better, fouling every shore ;
We disinfect, we do not probe, the crime.
Our engines plunge into the seas, they climb
Above our atmosphere : we grow not more
Profound as we approach the ocean's floor ;
Our flight is lofty, it is not sublime.
Yet long ago this Earth by struggling men
Was scuffed, was scraped by mouths that bubbled mud ;
And will be so again and yet again ;
Until we trace our poison to its bud
And root, and there uproot it : until then,
Earth will be warmed each winter by man's blood.

(p. 730)

Mr. Macbeth

12/19/2022 09:14:22

The OP must have changed the poem. I'm wondering what they had published originally.

Maya link

11/26/2020 22:23:52

I enjoyeed reading this

"Read History: So Learn Your Place in Time" (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

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