Edna St. Vincent Millay

Epitaph for the Race of Man

IV

O EARTH, unhappy planet born to die,
Might I your scribe and your confessor be,
What wonders must you not relate to me
Of Man, who when his destiny was high
Strode like the sun into the middle sky
And shone an hour, and who so bright a he,
And like the sun went down into the sea,
Leaving no spark to be remembered by.
But no; you have not learned in all these years
To tell the leopard and the newt apart;
Man, with his singular laughter, his droll tears,
His engines and his conscience and his art,
Made but a simple sound upon your ears:
The patient beating of the animal heart.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, text from Women on War, ed. Daniella Gioseffi (Feminist Press, 2003)

Read more of this 18 sonnet sequence here.

From the Poetry Foundation:

Millay’s next collection, Wine from These Grapes (1934), though it had no personal love poems, contained a notable eighteen sonnet sequence, “Epitaph for the Race of Man.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had published ten of the poems under that title in 1928; Millay added others and made decisions regarding the organization of the sequence, which has a panoramic scope. The first five sonnets prophesy man’s disappearance and indicate points in geological and evolutionary history from far past to distant future. The second set reveals man’s activities and capacity for heroism, but is followed by two sonnets demonstrating human intolerance and alienation from nature. In the sequence’s final sonnets, the eventual extinction of humanity is prophesied, with will and appetite dominating. The poet did not intend the “Epitaph” as a gloomy prediction but, rather, as a “challenge” to mankind, or as she told King in 1941, a “heartfelt tribute to the magnificence of man.” Walter S. Minot in his University of Nebraska dissertation concluded: “By continually balancing man’s greatness against his weakness, Millay has conjured up a miniature tragedy in which man, the tragic hero, is seen failing because of the fatal flaw within him.”