In a life rich with honors, Ragged Island was Edna St. Vincent Millay’s most treasured prize.
By Caskie Stinnett
[A] poetess, at least in the public mind, is a fragile, slight person, given to periods of intense concentration and brooding but so totally lacking in physical stamina as to cause constant concern in the hearts and minds of those around her. Not since Elizabeth Barrett Browning has a poetess fit this conception so snugly as Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose Camden childhood provided the backdrop for some of her most impressive work. Max Eastman, the writer, once remarked after visiting Miss Millay and her husband at Spindletop, their home in northern New York state, that he felt “on entering Spindletop that some very fragile piece of china, inestimable in value, was in unstable equilibrium upstairs.”
In June, 1933, worn-out and ill, Miss Millay was invited by Esther Adams, a close friend, to celebrate belatedly the poetess’ forty-first birthday at Miss Adams’ home on Bailey Island, near Brunswick. Miss Millay and Eugen Jan Boissevain, her Dutch businessman-husband, arrived on June 3, and they awoke the next morning to find a heavy fog had moved in from Casco Bay. They dressed hurriedly and took a walk along the shore and, as so often happens, the fog began to dissipate as the sun rose. Miss Millay stopped and clutched Eugen’s hand when she saw an island emerge from the mists across the bay. “Is it a mirage?” she whispered. “It is the most beautiful island I have ever seen. I want it.”
It was Ragged Island, an aptly named tract of land of about fifty acres, rising up from the sea several miles offshore. It was owned by Elijah Kellogg, a former minister who had turned to writing a very successful series of boys’ books. In the books, the island was referred to as Elm Island, possibly because there was an Elm Island nearby. It contained only a fairly primitive stone house and some minor outbuildings, there was no electricity and no running water, and the coastline was formidable and inhospitable except for one small protected harbor near the house. Boissevain bought the house as soon as he could that same year, and Miss Millay set about feverishly collecting second-hand furniture and fixtures to make the place habitable. Her writing schedule was strenuous, and she was struck by a particularly vicious case of influenza, which caused Boissevain to take her not to Ragged Island that year but to Antibes, on the Mediterranean coast of France. It was not until August of the following year that they finally got to Ragged Island, by which time Eugen had had considerable repair work done on the house, and a pump had been attached to the island well to bring water into the kitchen. Miss Millay’s biographers and her friends are in agreement that Ragged Island turned into the poetess’ greatest delight. The harbor was protected from the waves, and Vincent, as she was known to her friends, spent hours swimming in the cold water and sunning herself on the rocks. Disdaining a bathing suit as “unfit” for Ragged Island, she swam nude for hours, floating on her back, diving beneath the water to her husband’s dismay and coming up dozens of yards away, splashing and kicking with glee. When Eugen argued that she was so cold that she would get muscle cramps, she would swim off toward the sea, shouting to him over her shoulder that she had been brought up in Maine water and was used to it. “I like cold water,” she said. Later she would put on jeans and an old shirt, and sit on the rocks and read. She zestfully devoured suspense and detective novels, and had brought a boatload of them to Ragged Island with her. At times she would bring her pad and pencil to the rocks, and write. Exactly when she wrote the lovely poem “Ragged Island” is not certain, but it came after she and Eugen had spent many summers there, and quite possibly it was completed in 1947 and published posthumously in 1954 in a volume entitled Mine, the Harvest.
Every summer was the same and every summer was unbelievably simple. The Boissevains gathered driftwood and boiled lobsters on the beach. They drank wine and shared stories. Eugen bought a small sailboat and they occasionally sailed to Bailey Island for supplies. Their island was rough and rocky and often gulls would be blown against the rocks in storms and injured, and the couple would catch the gulls, bind up their wounds, and nurse them back to health. Each summer they would go earlier and stay later. Finally, they started to open the Ragged Island house in April, keeping warm by burning driftwood in the fireplace of the simple living room. In a world grown suddenly complex by the increasing fame of the poetess, Ragged Island became a greater prize. It offered her peace and tranquillity. Vincent Sheean, one of the few friends ever invited to Ragged Island, told how he was met upon arrival by Vincent, dressed in a white shirt, rolled-up jeans, and ancient canvas sandals, her eyes glowing with life. They cooked lobsters, picnicked on the beach. Then Sheean, his wife, and Eugen lay back on the rocks while Vincent recited sonnets from Epitaph for the Race of Man. On August 30, 1949, Eugen died, and in a brief letter to a friend Vincent said that Ragged Island was not for sale. “As soon as I can bear it,” she wrote, “I shall go back there.” It is doubtful that she ever did, as Miss Millay herself died the following year.
[O]n a cold but sunny day a few months ago, I asked a friend of mine, a lobsterman, to run me out to Ragged Island from Quahaug Bay. There were heavy swells in the sea and it took nearly an hour before we came up on the north shore of the island. My friend circled the coastline cautiously until he found the mouth of the protected harbor, then quickly moved inside. There was no pier, so I jumped from the boat to some small rocks. There is a new owner now and a new house, a modern wooden structure which I kept my distance from because I dislike trespassing, but the foundations of the old stone house rose above the deep grass and I could see where Miss Millay’s retreat from a demanding world had stood.
Beside the foundation, almost hidden by the waist-high grass, was an old sawhorse which had seen heavy use, and I wondered if it had been Eugen’s and if he had used it for sawing driftwood for the kitchen stove and fireplace. Walking toward the rocks I came across a dead sea gull lying in the grass, and skirting a thicket of wild blackberries I stepped into a marshy area, which ended abruptly at the rocks. There were patches of wild asters growing in the thickets, but the terrain was rough and there were no paths. Several hundred yards behind the house the island rose sharply, and scrub pine and spruce clung to an escarpment of stone. So far as I could see there was no way of reaching this outcropping, as walking would have been extremely difficult. Miss Millay and her husband, I decided, had spent most of their time around the harbor. I climbed the rocks beside the sea, and to the southwest I could see Bailey Island and to the east there was nothing but the blue Atlantic. The only sound I could hear was the wind and the surf.
Ragged Island possessed a bleakness, but there was beauty too in its wildness, the sort of beauty that would catch the eye of Edna St. Vincent Millay and cause her to write of the place: “Care becomes senseless there. . . . You only look; you scarcely feel.” A low stone fence snaked through the tall grass toward the hill behind the house, but it seemed pointless; it fenced in nothing. The stones had been merely laid on top of each other, and at places they had fallen to the ground leaving gaps in the fence line. I decided the fence had been the work of the retired minister; Vincent and Eugen were not the kind who would care for fences. To the left of the house a high ridge of stone, covered with scrub brush, came down almost to the sea. Here bayberry grew in profusion, and juniper clung to crevices in the rock. The small spruce trees were bent from the ocean wind; the Reverend Kellogg had built his stone house as close to the harbor as he could, but it had also exposed him to the winter storms that swept in from the Atlantic.
I climbed to the rocks above the tiny harbor, and watched the waves break on the bar and move in ripples toward shore. Behind me was a tangle of high grass, wild asters, bayberries, and wild roses. Two white butterflies winged by in that erratic way that butterflies have; they were caught for a moment in the sea wind and swept upward, but they regained control and flew on across the harbor. The top of the rocks were covered with clamshells; it was a fine place for gulls to dine. There were rocks everywhere, huge monoliths split from the base of the island itself by ice and the ceaseless turmoil of the sea, and hurled against the shore by gales. They were washed clean, and fragments of quartz imbedded in the stone glistened in the sunlight. I found what was almost a natural bench by climbing down a rock face, and sitting there I could see water sweeping in beneath me as each wave advanced and receded. It was a magnificent spot; sitting there I could see — in one direction — the field of tangled grass and stone, and to seaward there was only the Atlantic Ocean. I was certain that this place had been discovered by Miss Millay; it was ideal for staring, for brooding, for gathering thoughts, for doing whatever poets do in their own mystical way. These most certainly were the rocks upon which she had sunned herself when she emerged, naked and dripping, from the cold water. These were the rocks upon which she had sat for hours reading suspense novels. These were the rocks where she and Eugen had sat and talked; here she had waited for him on those days when he sailed alone to Bailey Island for supplies. And perhaps it was here, sitting on this strange rock-bench, that she had written “Ragged Island”:
“. . . And there is no driftwood there, because there is no beach;
Clean cliff going down as deep as
clear water can reach. . . .”
Top: A modern, wooden house now stands on Casco Bay’s Ragged, Island, but nearby, one can still see the
foundations of the simple, stone house where Edna St. Vincent Millay and, her husband spent quiet summers, far from the demands of her fame. Photograph by Jeno Rule Burdino.