Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Turner.

Today's poem is by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

She was an American poet who lived from 1892 to 1950.

She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, being the third woman to do so.

I've mentioned it before, but Richard Wilbur once said that she wrote some of the best sonnets of

the century. The poem that I'm going to read today is not actually a sonnet. It is called

Autumn Chains, and it goes like this.

Now the autumn shudders in the rose's root.

Far and wide, the ladders lean among the fruit.

Now the autumn clamors of the trellised frame, and the rose remembers the dust from which it came.

Brighter than the blossom on the rose's bow sits the wizened orange, bitter berry now.

Beauty never slumbers.

All is in her name.

But the rose remembers the dust from which it came.

So if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've heard me say that I'm not

really here to tell you what I think a poem means. I'm more interested in what the effect

of a poem is. Now, at times I do get into what it might mean or be implying or things like that.

But there's a couple things about this poem that I really like for the effect that they have.

The first thing that I wanted to mention is the word shutters at the very beginning.

So the first couplet is now the autumn shutters in the roses root.

And the shutters is the first, the last word of the first line.

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