Edna St. Vincent Millay Rides the Staten Island Ferry
Published: November, 2000
Bay Crossings welcomes this delightful contribution from Syvlia Plapinger. Ms. Plapinger has been published in many notable publications and lives in New York City.
We were very tired, we were very merry –
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
With these lines, Edna St. Vincent Millay introduced her poem, Recuerdo. It was the Staten Island ferry she was celebrating--in the way she best knew how, with the music of her words. Like most poets and other artists, Millay was a romantic (apart from her other driving personas); and for romantic New Yorkers, crossing the Upper Bay late at night is a shared expression and experience of love.
Staten Island is one of New York City’s five boroughs. Until the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was completed in 1964, there was no land link with the rest of the city. Charted crossings began in 1750 with a small, flat-bottomed boat, called a piragua; it resembled a canoe, but was masted and had sails. In 1810, sixteen-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt wanted to start a regular terry service across the Upper Bay and asked his mother for help. She told him if he would promise to finish a project he had started on the family she would give him $100 to buy one boat. They each fulfilled the agreement, and Cornelius Vanderbilt established the Staten Island Ferry. According to some sources, paddling was needed to balance the keel-less boat, and it is thought that Cornelius insisted on doing his own rowing.
The first steamboat was used in 1817. And after interim managements the running of the ferry was taken over by the city government in 1905. Round-trip fares were ten cents for many years, eventually increasing to fifty cents; today all rides are free.
The seven-ferry fleet--now diesel-powered--operates 24 hours a day all week, making the 5.2-mile crossing in 25 minutes. Approximately 65,000 passengers are carried each day.
Bob Rush, a former merchant mariner, has been with the Staten Island Ferry for more than eight years. He is a mate, a deck officer just below the captain in rank. He oversees the loading of cars, activities of the deck hands, and the safety of passengers. Standing at the stern on a return trip to Manhattan one evening, ahead the last rays of the sun making the buildings of lower Manhattan glisten and aft a triangle of thick foam in the water, a half-moon high in a still-blue sky, Mate Rush and a deck hand talked about the pleasures of their jobs. The hours... the shifts--they took turns extolling--four days ...thirty-two hours.., the fresh air... "It has the best parts of going to sea," Mr. Rush said "but going home to your family at the end of your shift." The ferry has particular meaning for many of the passengers, he added. He has seen people strewing ashes in the bay. And on his midnight-to-eight o’clock tour, he has overheard marriage proposals.
The biggest passenger loads are during the morning and evening rush hours. The ferry is a lifeline for Staten Islanders who work in Manhattan; some of the boats carry cars on the lower dock. Many people who drive to their job still prefer the ferry route to the Verrazano Bridge; it’s a shorter, cheaper ride, they don’t have traffic problems, and. they can relax in or out of their car before starting the day’s work. Paul, a director for an art restoration company, rides his motor bike onto the ferry. It gives him an extra 20 minutes to get ready for the tensions ahead: thinking, catching up on paper work, or making phone calls. Could there be a better way, he seemed to be saying.
Now that crime in New York is down, there are more tourists than ever; sometimes it’s difficult to find someone to speak to in English. They board the ferries excitedly, many with cameras, and take positions on the open decks on all sides, watching the receding tip of Manhattan and New York Harbor, the Verrazano Bride spanning The Narrows, and, passing quite close, the magnificent Statue of Liberty, France’s gift to America, more grand than expected and a bit breathtaking, even for native New Yorkers.
Throughout much of her career, Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most successful and respected poets in America.
Only through fortunate chance was Millay brought to public notice. Her mother happened on an announcement of a poetry contest sponsored by The Lyric Year, a proposed annual anthology. Millay submitted some poems, and the editor liked them so well that he awarded her the first prize. Meanwhile, Caroline B. Dow, a school director who heard Millay recite her poetry and play her own compositions for piano, determined that the talented young woman should go to college. Encouraged by Miss Dow’s promise to contribute to her expenses, Millay applied for scholarships to attend Vassar. After taking several courses at Barnard College in the spring of 1913, Millay enrolled at Vassar, where she received the education that developed her into a cultured and learned poet.
Millay went to New York in the fall of 1917, gave some poetry readings, and refused an offer of a comfortable job as secretary to a wealthy woman. In February of 1918, poet Arthur Davison Ficke stopped off in New York.
At the time Ficke was a U.S. Army major bearing military dispatches to France. When he met Millay, they fell in love and had a brief but intense affair that affected them for the rest of their lives and about which both wrote idealizing sonnets.
As a humorist and satirist, Millay expressed the postwar feelings of young people, their rebellion against tradition, and their mood of freedom symbolized for many women by bobbed hair. These sentiments found expression in the opening poem of the collection, "First Fig," beginning playfully with the line, "My candle burns at both ends." Prudence, respectability, and constancy were denigrated in other poems of the volume. The cavalier attitude revealed in sonnets through lines like "Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!" and "I shall forget you presently, my dear" was new, presenting the woman as player in the love game no less than the man and frankly accepting biological impulses in love affairs.
The years between 1923 and 1927 were largely devoted to marriage, travel, the move to the old farm Millay called Steepletop. In August of 1927, however, Millay became involved in the Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti case. She was arrested, with many others, for picketing the State House in Boston, protesting the execution of the Italian anarchists convicted of murder. Convinced, like thousands of others, of a miscarriage of justice, and frustrated at being unable to move Governor Fuller to exercise mercy, Millay later said that the case focused her social consciousness.
One sunny August day, Martha, with four young children in tow, was leaning against the railing at the front of the boat, relishing the rushing air hitting her face. Now living permanently in New York (from Puerto Rico), she needed to put her feelings into words: "It’s so wonderful, and it’s free ...I can come here whenever I want to, when I have time...it’s peaceful, it’s...it’s a kind of ...a kind of meditation..."
"And you can leave your problems behind you," a man next to her offered.
"There are no problems," Martha asserted in a strong, fervent voice, "only solutions."
Captain Jeff White was five years old when he made his first trip on the Staten Island Ferry. His father was a captain for 25 years and often took Jeff along for the ride. He gave him tours of the ferry, showed him how everything worked, and let him sit in the pilothouse, watching his dad steer the boat. Jeff decided then that that was what he would do when he grew up.
As soon as he finished high school, he joined the crew, working his way up from deck hand to mate and finally, eight years ago to captain. He turned the wheel so casually as he talked, guiding the ferry into the dock in New York Harbor without a hint of a bump, it looked as easy as maneuvering a rowboat. He loves the fresh air and all the people he meets and the feeling many of them have that the Staten Island ferry is something special.
One evening a young couple asked him to marry them. He explained that it would not be a legal marriage unless they were twelve miles offshore. But they said they didn’t care--they were having another wedding the next week--they just wanted to get married on the Staten Island Ferry. They begged him to do it. So he performed the ceremony.
Then not much has changed, it seems, since Edna Millay wrote "Recuerdo," Spanish for "I remember." In the summer of 1913, taking classes at Barnard, she met Salomon de la Selvea, a Nicaraguan poet who was teaching at Columbia. She writes about one night in their long friendship.
Millay knew how much a part of the message were sound and rhythm. Read "Recuerdo" aloud and feel the racking of the ferry in the repeating first lines. And listen to the rhyming couplets and consistent meter in each stanza; let them pull you back and forth with the couple sated by the joys of that night and each other. As Holly Peps says in her introduction to Early Poems, ....many of her poems…coax the language to sing."
We were very tired we were very merry-
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable-
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table.
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moan;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn cams soon.
We were very tired, we were very merry-
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
We were very tired, we were very merry-
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
Bon Voyage
