Waxing Poetic: To Losers by George Dillon

     George Dillon was an American editor and poet.  In 1928, at the age of 22, Dillon was asked to introduce Edna St. Vincent Millay, 36, at a her Chicago performance.  He attended a party afterwards where he recited some of his poetry.  Millay asked him to lunch the next day and a relationship developed which each of them immortalized in poetry.
     In 1932, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and he and Millay went to Paris to live together (it was a trial separation from her husband).  But their relationship turned tumultuous and she returned to her husband.  They remained friends and he remained a bachelor for the rest of his life.  He inspired Millay's 52-sonnet sequence Fatal Interview. 
     The following poem by Dillon, although written before he met Millay, is about lost love.

To Losers

Let loneliness be mute. Accuse
Only the wind for what you lose.
Only the wind has ever known
Where anything you lost has gone.
It is the wind whose breath shall come
To quench tall-flaming trees and numb
The narrow bones of birds. It is
The wind whose dissipating kiss
Disbands the soft-assembled rose.
It is the wordless wind that knows
Where every kind of beauty goes.

And if you lose love in the end
Say it was taken by the wind.