Death devours all lovely things;
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness—presently
Every bed is narrow.

These lines are from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s short lyric “Dirge Without Music,” written in the early twentieth century and widely anthologized. Millay, known for her formally deft, emotionally direct poetry, here adopts the traditional “dirge” mode—lamentation for the dead—while pointedly refusing the consolations of religious afterlife. The poem’s classical allusion to “Lesbia with her sparrow” invokes Catullus’s famous poems about Lesbia and her pet bird, linking modern grief to an ancient tradition of elegy. The stanza’s blunt compression and nursery-rhyme cadence underscore the universality and inevitability of death.

The stanza insists that death is indiscriminate: it “devours” beauty and tenderness as readily as anything else. By invoking Lesbia—an emblem of erotic love and lyric intimacy in Catullus—Millay suggests that even the most celebrated, “lovely” attachments end in the same darkness. The closing line, “Every bed is narrow,” collapses the distance between the lover’s bed and the grave, implying that all human comfort and spaciousness is finally reduced to confinement. The tone is unsentimental but not cold: its starkness is a way of honoring grief without pretending it can be redeemed by easy metaphysical assurances.