Passer Mortuus Est by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Passer Mortuus Est
Edna St. Vincent MillayDeath devours all lovely things;
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness,—presently
Every bed is narrowUnremembered as old rain
Dries the sheer libation,
And the little petulant hand
Is an annotation.After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it was not love,
Now that love is perished?
SELECTED BY MANDY MOE PWINT TU
I first encountered Edna St Vincent Millay’s poetry when I wandered into Elizabeth’s Secondhand Bookshop in Perth, Australia on a rainy evening. This was one of the first poems I read from her collection. I immediately fell in love with this piece; the final stanza, “After all, my erstwhile dear, / My no longer cherished, / Need we say it was not love / Now that love has perished?” has stayed with me for many years as I navigate relationships and their transience – a reminder that love persists, despite.
ABOUT MANDY MOE PWINT TU
Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat from Yangon, Myanmar and the author of Fablemaker (Gaudy Boy, 2025). She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.
ABOUT EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892. In 1917, Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems (Harper, 1917). She published A Few Figs from Thistles (Harper & Brothers, 1920), a volume of poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism. In 1923, Millay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (Flying Cloud Press, 1922). She also wrote the libretto of one of the… (more)
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ENDNOTES
- This is Day 66 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: loss • forgetfulness • death • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
