Prayer to Persephone" Manuscript Poem, Signed

1918. Holograph poem, signed, 1p., recto only, rough torn on the left edge (likely extracted from a book), offsetting and staining, lightly browned, 4 ¾" x 7 ¾". Signed at bottom "Edna St. Vincent Millay." Written in memory of Dorothy Coleman, Millay's close friend at Vassar who died in 1918 during the influenza pandemic. The poem addresses the Greek goddess Persephone, asking her to comfort Coleman's spirit, likened to a lonely child in the underworld: "Be to her, Persephone, / All the things I might not be: / Take her head upon your knee. / She that was so proud and wild, / Flippant, arrogant and free, / She that had no need of me, / Is a little lonely child, / Lost in Hell; Persephone, / Take her head upon your knee; / Say to her, 'My dear, my dear, / It is not so dreadful here!'"

"Prayer to Persephone" forms part of "Memorial to D.C.," five elegies Millay composed at Vassar following Coleman's death. When Millay returned to read at Vassar in 1928, The Miscellany News reported she read "Memorial to D.C." "with an intensity of feeling which gave a sense of their significance." The 1918 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, with young adults disproportionately affected. Millay's invocation of Persephone (the goddess who herself traversed between worlds of life and death) provided classical framework for confronting sudden mortality among her generation. The poem appeared in her 1920 collection A Few Figs from Thistles, which established her reputation for combining traditional lyric forms with modern sensibility.