Edna St. Vincent Millay had been erroneously categorized as just another woman writing about love until feminist critics revived her canon with fresh insights into her stark images and commentary on humanist themes. A sizable portion of her early works displays a hard, intellectual edge and harsher determinism. One of the early sonnets, “Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare” (1923), lauds structure. To demonstrate logic, the text further constrains the fourteen-line Petrarchan form by reducing the number of rhymes from five to four. The rhyme scheme of abbaabbacddccd admits only one feminine foot with “nowhere,” which ends on an off beat. The subject is also tightly controlled, focusing on geometry as the only pure beauty.
In contrast, “The Return” (1934), a less idealized study of transience, pictures nature as a constant, a dispassionate entity apart from the romanticism, escapism, religion, and philosophy that humans invest in it. The text develops a lyric approach with four-beat lines rhyming abab. In five quatrains, she again objectifies nature by describing the earth mother receiving dead beings—a man and a lynx—who “Come trailing blood unto her door.” Devoid of outward grief, the divine goddess offers shelter, but no pity, because sentiment is inconsistent with nature. The detachment suggests a departure from suffering that writers of the post–World War I era found difficult to achieve.
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.
The poem’s chief delight is a controlling metaphor of the falconer with hooded bird. It is significant that the bird is female, a symbol of inhibited womanhood. A jarring detail in line 9 notes, “Her head stinks of its hood, her feathers reek / Of me, that quake at the thunder.” The candor of the poet’s introspection produces a remarkable list of commands to the falcon, which she bids to “Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost. / But climb.” The departure from stricter metrical forms complements earlier works with deliberate pacing that concludes on a resolute double beat.
A similar urge to flee stifling convention dominates “Wild Swans,” an earnest, complex, eight-line stanza rhyming abbccbbc. The reversal of positions, bird with woman, places the poet-speaker indoors and the migrating flock overhead. Again, Millay punches out her determination with a double beat and supportive pause when she calls, “Wild swans, come over the town, come over / The town again, trailing your legs and crying.” As does the hood in the previous poem, the house stifles with its implications of dreary domesticity, but the poet blames not housewifery, but her “tiresome heart, forever living and dying.” Identification with the wild flight transfers the crying to the speaker, who feels compelled to depart and lock the door behind her.
