Explore "O Ailing Love" by Edna St. Vincent Millay on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
O ailing Love, compose your struggling wing!
Confess you mortal; be content to die. How better dead, than be this awkward thing
Dragging in dust its feathers of the sky;
Hitching and rearing, plunging beak to loam, / Upturned, disheveled, uttering a weak sound
Less proud than of the gull that rakes the foam, / Less kind than of the hawk that scours the ground.
While yet your awful beauty, even at bay, / Beats off the impious eye, the outstretched hand, / And what your hue or fashion none can say, / Vanish, be fled, leave me a wingless land . . .
Save where one moment down the quiet tide
Fades a white swan, with a black swan beside.