We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

These opening lines are from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s short lyric “Recuerdo,” a poem that recollects a youthful night spent riding a ferry back and forth until morning. Millay (1892–1950), associated with early-20th-century American lyric modernism, often wrote in a voice that blends immediacy, musicality, and frank emotional candor. “Recuerdo” is structured as a memory-piece: the speaker looks back on an episode of carefree companionship—tiredness and exhilaration intertwined—set against an urban waterfront landscape where the ferry’s repetitive crossings become the night’s rhythm.

The couplet captures a paradox central to the poem: exhaustion and joy coexist, and the very act of being “very tired” heightens the sense of reckless merriment. The repeated ferry crossings suggest both aimlessness and freedom—movement without destination—turning ordinary public transit into a private adventure. The diction is simple and emphatic (“very…very”), giving the memory a childlike clarity, while the long dash suspends the thought as if the speaker is savoring it. More broadly, the lines celebrate transient, unproductive pleasure as something worth remembering: a night defined not by achievement but by shared experience and the buoyant rhythm of return.