steepletop

visiting vincent

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There are only two lines I’ve ever wanted written on my tombstone. The first, I spotted on the grave of Florine Syndyer in Green River Cemetery last summer while visiting the resting place of poet Frank O’Hara. Her heart was inexhaustible. 

The other candidate succinctly captures my experience of motherhood. It is the opening line of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo.” We were very tired, we were very merry. I remember reading that line, putting my hand on my heart, and kissing my newborn baby again and again. “Put it on my grave,” I said.  

Steepletop, the Austerlitz estate of Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay, twentieth-century poet and playwright, preferred to be called Vincent. She got her middle name from St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, where her uncle was treated after an accident at sea just before her birth.

My daughter’s middle name is Millay. 

When I learned I was pregnant with a girl, I knew I would call her after Vincent. Stay alive, stay loving, stay open. These were the directives of Millay’s poems. I wanted my girl to be rebellious and observant, spirited and deeply feeling. And so she is Rose Millay, my Rosie Millie. 

I read once that Vincent’s mother traveled with a suitcase full of Shakespeare, which she read to her three girls during their childhood in Maine—an example of motherhood I cherish. Read to them. Give them poetry. Let the world open up. 

A few weeks ago, I took my children on a small pilgrimage to Steepletop, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s hilltop estate. An abandoned berry farm when she purchased it, the home takes its name from the purple steeplebush that still grows there. 

The pool at Steepletop, September 2023

Vincent by the pool, circa 1935

Currently closed to the public, I thought we’d have to spy the house from the road, but when a guest of the caretaker saw us, she said it was far too beautiful a day not to enjoy the property, only to beware of bears. 

I stood with my children outside the white farmhouse on a hill where Vincent wrote, where she and her husband Eugen hosted raucous, multi-day parties with gin and tennis and outdoor theatrical performances. 

Further up the hill was Vincent’s writing cabin. When her mother died in 1931, she planted pines around the cabin to remind her of her mother and her childhood in Maine. 

The writing cabin

Vincent died in the house on the hill and is buried nearby in the woods. The path to her grave is marked with her words. Near her grave is the poem “Steepletop.” It ends like this: I, too, live in this garden. 

The Poet’s Trail

Sitting in the grass by the pool where the poet swam naked with her friends, laying beside her grave and reading to my daughter who shares her name, I felt close to Vincent and to her line that is always near my heart: Oh world, I cannot hold thee close enough.

Vincent with friends at Steeletop

But what has stayed with me weeks later are the doors. On the property, Vincent took low stone walls and the foundation of an old barn and constructed gardens and outdoor rooms in what she called “the ruins.” The doors remain, doors without walls, backdropped by fields of fern and goldenrod, petrified cypress trees, the woods beyond. 

I keep coming back to the image of Vincent, close to the age I am now, wrapped in a sheet and lying by the pool. I keep coming back to the memory of my daughter’s hand in mine as she pulled me down the mossy path in the woods in September. And I keep coming back to the doors (further admonition from Vincent: Stay alive, stay loving, stay open) waiting, opening up to everything.