A Few Figs from Thistles

“My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night”—and yet the speaker turns its brief blaze into a challenge to foes and friends alike.

In these poems and sonnets, Edna St. Vincent Millay moves from a ferry crossing under the moon to the streets of Macdougal, where desire, loneliness, and laughter jostle for room. Her speakers are no solemn keepers of heartbreak: they mock the rules of love, flirt with danger, and find mischief even in sorrow. A faithless lover may be more exciting than a patient one; a small sin may end not in repentance but in a ribbon tied in the hair. The voice is bright, sharp, and wonderfully hard to pin down. How much can a heart risk—and still laugh?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.