Poetry Analysis: "First Fig"
First Fig
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends–
It gives a lovely light!
I like to start with the poetic form, so here is the poem again, scanned:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends–
It gives a lovely light!
Iambic lines in alternating tetrameter and trimeter, characteristic of ballads. Unlike ballads, though, it is ABAB, not xAxA. Each line ends at the end of a clause with a punctuation mark, no enjambment. The regularity of the meter calls attention to the one deviation: the spondaic “both ends.” Well, it’s sort of spondaic. Technically, “ends” is a catalectic syllable, an incomplete foot, taking the place of what ought to be another iamb. Instead, “ends” takes up a whole foot by itself. Alternatively, it is the start of a new foot that is unfinished, open-ended (pun totally intended). But when I think about the phrase “both ends” separate from its line, I like to think of it as a spondee, giving proper weight to each syllable while keeping them together.
The attention to the word “ends” fascinates me because it has a “pruning rhyme” (see my “Fleas” post) with “friends.” Ends is contained in friends–which we all know from stupid and cliched Facebook posts about family–so that “ends” shows up twice both auditorily and visually. But rather than the dumb “all friENDs end with END” thing, St. Vincent Millay makes the word grow into something positive: friendship. Ends and friends go together without being depressing.
Among other fun formal elements is alliteration in “burns” and “both,” “foes” and “friends,” “lovely” and “light.” What is it doing? I’m not sure yet! It makes me consider the one line without alliteration–line 2–for its gravity and seriousness. Alliteration can make a poem happy and frolicky and pretty, a happy little tongue-twister. Line 2 is not so lucky. Alliteration, like rhyme, forms a connection between words. “Burns” and “both” doesn’t make much sense to me, and that’s ok. Maybe I’ll find something new in the text on another reading.
Alliteration is a pleasant segue into assonance, similar vowel sounds but not necessarily rhymes. I’m particularly interested in the vowel sounds thanks to the interjectory “ah” and “oh.” What’s the difference between them? Why say one to friends and the other to foes? I can’t find another use of the “ah” sound in the poem, making this instance unique. “Oh,” however, is found in “both” and “foes.” The “ah” may be for the foes, but the “oh” is contained in the word “foes.” So whatever message is being sent to the friends is connected to the foes, too, in some way. The word “both” seems to be a little nod to this, a little arrow pointing to the dual nature of “oh.” Do I have any idea what that nature is? Nope! But I suspect that I can find something there.
Before I get into content and meaning, consider the punctuation. The semicolons are interesting choices. There are no periods in this poem, curious for a poem about endings. This poem does not want a period. This poem wants a brilliant and short end with an exclamation point. The exclamation point is the last character in the poem, sitting in the most emphatic position. How neat is it that you can look at the shape of the exclamation mark, how it’s an inverted “i.” It almost looks like an upside-down candle with the dot acting as the flame…
The gist of this poem is the speaker recognizing she is 1) dying young or 2) “peaking” early or burning out too soon. She knows this and seems to be at peace, even relishing in the beauty that results from her early end. Now, the piece of the poem I’ve ignored entirely… the title. This poem comes from a collection called "A Few Figs From Thistles," so the titles refers to this poem as a fig, a piece of fruit among less desirable flora. When we consider the poem as a self-contained unit and not part of the whole collection, the best I can make of the title is that the fig is youth. The fig that blooms early dies early, too. With this in mind, the “ah” seems a little bit taunting, like, “Hey bitches, I may die young but I lived a better life than any of you will have when you’re 80. YOLO.”
$#!t. This is a YOLO poem.
I should probably call it a “carpe diem” poem, but YOLO seems more fitting, not necessarily telling other people to join in on the candle-burning but asking for an audience.
I return to “both ends.” Out of curiousity, I looked at the first and last words of the poem: “my…light.” This poem is unashamedly selfish in that the speaker will burn out early just to watch the light dance, regardless of the consequences for other people. It is a poem about light, and that light is the life of the speaker. Assonance in “my” and “light” ties up the poem in a neat package, a tight loop. What sound is it that holds the poem together? I. There may not be an “I” in the poem, only a “my,” but the speaker’s self is there, asking for an audience to watch her burn. (Asking for an eye?) “First Fig” is a short and strong assertion of the self. It is a speaker declaring that she will live the way she lives regardless of everyone else, but the world is welcome to watch her.
Write on!