I just noticed something odd

[Orrex]

On a non-DU posting forum, I noticed that someone used the following as a sig quote:

"My candle burns at both ends,
It will not last the night.
But ah! - my foes, and
Oh!- my friends,
It casts a pretty light."
Roald Dahl

Well, that's clearly Edna St. Vincent Millay's First Fig, though I imagine that Dahl may have found it sufficiently charming to adopt it as a motto.

But I wanted to double-check my recollection, so I consulted our good friends at Google, and I found a total of 326 hits on a search for "Roald Dahl" + "it will not last the night," which makes me think either that I'm wildly mistaken or else a whole bunch of people have a misconception about the quote's origin.

What are your thoughts? Any passionate fans of Roald or Edna out there who can shed some light on this urgent and world-shaking matter?

on edit: I know that Roald was six when First Fig was published. I'm not suggesting that Edna stole it from him; instead, I'm wondering why the quatrain is so often attributed to him.

[Goblinmonger]

1. Being that Dahl

would have been 6 when "First Fig" was published, I am guessing Dahl ripped it off or someone mistakenly attributed it to him and it spread on the web. I don't know the specifics, but I do know that Millay came first in chronology.

[Orrex]

4. Well sure, but what I meant was that

I wonder what the source of the misattribution might be.

For example, is it some deep, Anglophilic/anti-US conspiracy seeking to credit a British author with a mellifluous little quatrain?

I'm sure that it must be.

[jobycom]

2. Well, your link shows Edna published it in 1922 (if accurate) and Dahl

was born in 1916, so I'd go with Edna as the writer. I saw a reference to it being a saying Dahl used on a book cover, and that he lived by that saying, but he didn't write it.

[melody]

3. Dahl was about 6 when it was published

So I think I'd give the attribution to Millay. lol

Seriously, Dahl doubtless cited it somewhere, not thinking he needed attribution (since Millay is well-known),
but others may not have recognized it and so quoted it as Dahl's own words.

[Orrex]

5. That seems reasonable

Millay might not be a household name at the moment, but it would still be nice to give her credit for her work!

[BurtWorm]

7. More likely, it was some idiot (or ignoramus?) who made a gigantic mistake

and had it replicated and proliferated on the Internet or via e-mail, just as disgusting right wing rants against immigrants and Moslems have wound up being attribuited to George Carlin. In the wrong hands, the internet is a great way to compound an error.

[peacetalksforall]

6. From University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"JoEllen Green Kaiser

Much of Millay’s work of the early 1920s seems on its surface more like the modernist "Spring" than the sentimental "Song of a Second April" . Most strikingly, Millay attacked the sentimental construction of absent love in A Few Figs From Thistles and to a lesser extent in Second April. Her most famous poem, after all, does not mourn absent love but rejoices in love’s impermanence:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light!

While this "First Fig" marked Millay’s break from traditional sentimentality, however, it did not necessarily signal her embrace of modernism. In contradistinction to the modernist creed of impersonality enunciated by Eliot, Millay’s poetry remains personal. Her attitude toward love may not be that shared by her nineteenth-century predecessors, but she does share with them a belief in the centrality of love for poetry.

JoEllen Green Kaiser, "Displaced Modernism: Millay and the Triumph of Sentimentality" in Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal. Diane P. Freedman, ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995; 33."

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/MAPS/poets/m_r/millay/fig.htm