O ailing Love, compose your struggling wing!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
1892 to 1950
O ailing Love, compose your struggling wing!
Confess you mortal; be content to die.
How better dead, than be this awkward thing
Dragging in dust its feathers of the sky,
Hitching and rearing, plunging beak to loam,
Upturned, disheveled, utt’ring a weak sound
Less proud than of the gull that rakes the foam,
Less kind than of the hawk that scours the ground.
While yet your awful beauty, even at bay,
Beats off the impious eye, the outstretched hand,
And what your hue or fashion none can say,
Vanish, be fled, leave me a wingless land . . .
Save where one moment down the quiet tide
Fades a white swan, with a black swan beside.
Edna St. Vincent Millay's O ailing Love, compose your struggling wing!
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- Multiple revisions to ensure the arrangement honors the poet's original vision
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