The Singing-Woman from the Wood's Edge

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

　　

---

What should I be but a prophet and a liar, Whose mother was a leprechaun, whose father was a friar? Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water, What should I be but the fiend's god-daughter? And who should be my playmates but the adder and the frog, That was got beneath a furze-bush and born in a bog? And what should be my singing, that was christened at an altar, But Aves and Credos and Psalms out of the Psalter? You will see such webs on the wet grass, maybe, As a pixie-mother weaves for her baby, You will find such flame at the wave's weedy ebb As flashes in the meshes of a mer-mother's web, But there comes to birth no common spawn From the love of a priest for a leprechaun, And you never have seen and you never will see Such things as the things that swaddled me! After all's said and after all's done, What should I be but a harlot and a nun? In through the bushes, on any foggy day, My Da would come a-swishing of the drops away, With a prayer for my death and a groan for my birth, A-mumbling of his beads for all that he was worth. And there'd sit my Ma, with her knees beneath her chin, A-looking in his face and a-drinking of it in, And a-marking in the moss some funny little saying That would mean just the opposite of all that he was praying! He taught me the holy-talk of Vesper and of Matin, He heard me my Greek and he heard me my Latin, He blessed me and crossed me to keep my soul from evil, And we watched him out of sight, and we conjured up the devil! Oh, the things I haven't seen and the things I haven't known. What with hedges and ditches till after I was grown, And yanked both ways by my mother and my father, With a "Which would you better?" and a "Which would you rather?" With him for a sire and her for a dam, What should I be but just what I am?

---

---