Dirge without Music, Edna St. Vincent Millay

Stephen Orlofsky, (my "sweet" little nephew who used to wake me every morning one summer to ask if I had a "bu bu"--yiddish for a small injury), picked up on a beautiful poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay and I want to show the whole poem below. At the family's memorial service for Joyce on December 23 (Joyce would have been 75 if she had lived), we're going to try to go over to Millay's house (which is in Austerlitz not far from our house in Copake) and read a few of Millay's poems in Joyce's Memory.

Dirge without Music
--Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.