“Renascence” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1912)

This 1912 poem is considered one of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s best known and most widely read poems. It is credited as the poem which brought her work to a wider audience. The poem is 200-plus lines and written in the first-person. It portrays a narrator contemplating nature and feeling overwhelmed by nature, human suffering, the deaths of others, and contemplations about the grave. A falling rain reminds the speaker about life’s renewal as well as its beauty. Millay wrote the poem while looking out from Mount Battie in Camden, Maine, where a plaque commemorates the poem.

“An Alexandrite Pendant for My Mother” by Marilyn Hacker (1973)

An award-winning poet who blends high culture with colloquial language, Marilyn Hacker writes formal poems and fits into the poetic tradition along with Robert Lowell and Adrienne Rich. She writes using sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, blank verse, and heroic couplets. “An Alexandrite Pendant for My Mother” conveys a sense of otherness, one that examines the definitions of home as well as the experience of travel and living abroad. It is an existential poem, exploring what it means to live as the other in a place vastly different from the one an individual typically calls home.