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The Sunday Magazine

Dirge Without Music, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

To honour the victims of the deadly attack in Toronto on Monday, we invited the actor R.H. Thomson to read a poem for us. Dirge Without Music was first published in 1928, and it remains one of the most haunting elegies ever written.
CBC Radio ·
People attend a vigil at Ryerson University to remember Anne Marie D'Amico, a victim of Monday's van attack in Toronto on April 26, 2018. (David Donnelly/CBC)

Dirge Without Music

To honour the victims of the deadly attack in Toronto on Monday, we invited Canadian actor R.H. Thomson to read a poem for us. Dirge Without Music was first published in 1928, and it remains one of the most haunting, beautiful elegies ever written. Listen to the full recording above and read the poem below.
Edna St. Vincent Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to do so. She was also known for her feminist activism. (Carl Van Vechten, 1933)

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 and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They are 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.
 

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