In 1928, Millay produced "Dirge Without Music," a disturbingly clear-eyed, bittersweet love plaint. The twelfth line offers only a glimpse at the bright-eyed person the poet-speaker has lost. Opening on a petulant, wordy argument for private grief, the poet-speaker stops herself in line 2 with a firmly resigned four-stage pause: "So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind." Battling impermanence all the way to the grave, she bears resentment like an Olympic baton in a prim assertion, "I know. But I do not approve." The final stanza, returned to the previous tight-lipped self-absorption, winds down to repetition of the speaker's earlier disapproval, as though her mind is unable to compromise on the subject of losing a loved one.
After two decades of focusing on technically precise verse, Millay wrote "On Thought in Harness." With its emotional free-style verse in three rhymed stanzas, the poet overturned criticisms that she was a purist rightfully placed among the Edwardian traditionalists. As a testimony to her versatility, the poem is a suitable antithesis to "I Will Put Chaos into Fourteen Lines." With varying line lengths, she demonstrates hesitancy at letting her mind free of an unnatural containment.
