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MYERS Millay Sonnet 29
MYERS Millay Sonnet 29
After graduating from Vassar, Millay, whose friends called her “Vincent," moved to New York
City’s Greenwich Village, where she led a Bohemian life. She lived in a nine-foot-wide attic
and wrote anything she could find an editor willing to accept. She and the other writers of
Greenwich Village were, according to Millay herself, “very, very poor and very, very merry.”
She joined the Provincetown Players in its early days and befriended writers such as Witter
Bynner, Edmund Wilson, Susan Glaspell, and Floyd Dell, who asked for Millay to marry him.
Millay, who was openly bisexual, refused, despite Dell’s attempts to persuade her otherwise.
That same year Millay published A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), a volume of poetry which
drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism. In
1923, Millay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver. In addition to
publishing three plays in verse, Millay also wrote the libretto of one of the few American grand
operas, The King’s Henchman (1927).
Millay married Eugen Boissevain, a self-proclaimed feminist and widower of Inez Milholland,
in 1923. Boissevain gave up his own pursuits to manage Millay’s literary career, setting up the
readings and public appearances for which Millay grew quite famous. According to Millay’s
own accounts, the couple acted liked two bachelors, remaining “sexually open” throughout
their twenty-six-year marriage, which ended with Boissevain’s death in 1949. Edna St. Vincent
Millay died in 1950.
B Before You Read — Reviewing the Sonnet Form
D o you remember what a sonnet is? Before William Shakespeare’s day, the word “sonnet”
meant simply “little song,” from the Italian "sonnetto," and the name could be applied
to any short lyric poem. In Renaissance Italy and then in Elizabethan England, the sonnet
became a fixed poetic form, consisting of 14 lines, usually iambic pentameter in English.
Different types of sonnets evolved in the different languages of the poets writing them, with
variations in rhyme scheme and metrical pattern. But all sonnets have a two-part thematic
structure, containing a problem and solution, a question and answer or a proposition and
reinterpretation within their 14 lines and a "volta," or turn, between the two parts.
Sonnet Form
The original form is the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, in which the 14 lines are arranged in
an octet (8 lines) rhyming abba abba and a sestet (6 lines) rhyming either cdecde or cdcdcd.
The English or Shakespearean sonnet came later, and it is made of three quatrains rhyming
abab cdcd efef and a closing rhymed heroic couplet. The Spenserian sonnet is a variation de-
veloped by Edmund Spenser in which the quatrains are linked by their rhyme scheme: abab
bcbc cdcd ee. Since its introduction into English in the 16th century, the 14-line sonnet form
has remained relatively stable, proving itself a flexible container for all kinds of poetry, long
enough that its images and symbols can carry detail rather than becoming cryptic or abstract,
and short enough to require a distillation of poetic thought.
Enter Millay’s sonnet “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines.” Here Millay argues for the
importance of the sonnet, and really all poetic forms. The sonnet details the poet’s struggle
to wrest Chaos into Order. Chaos and Order come to metaphorically represent two parts
to artistic expression: Order becomes the structure, the means through which the poet can
communicate, while Chaos Millay sees as the artistic impulse or creativity. To have Order
without Chaos results in empty, passionless poetry; to have Chaos without order gives us
poetry that is incomprehensible. Millay’s task as a poet is take that “something simple not yet
understood” (Chaos) and hold him “till he with Order mingles and combines.” Being a poet
for Millay is negotiating between the desire to break down structures to express an original
thought and the need to be understood:
This is not to say that the sonnet is free of regret. The speaker in the sonnet is later in years. At
line 9 (again the volta), Millay offers the image of the “lonely tree” in winter, whose boughs,
now empty, were once crowded with birds. The sonnet’s tone is nostalgic, looking back to a
time when “summer sang in” her ” a little while.” Interestingly, the root of “nostalgia” is Greek
for a type of pain. The speaker of the sonnet experiences this pain when hearing the rain on
the window and then being reminded of “unremembered lads that not again/ Will turn to me
at midnight with a cry” ( 7-8). Older women are pretty much absent from sonnets, and yet
here Millay’s speaker is a woman looking back on her youth.
1) Discuss how Edna St. Vincent Millay portrays her feelings in “Sonnet 29” using form,
imagery and figurative language.
2) How does Edna St. Vincent Millay fuse content and form in "Sonnet 29", and how does this
fusion reinforce the overall purpose and message of the poem?
3) Compare and contrast the poetic representation of love and relationships in "Sonnet 29" by
Edna St. Vincent Millay and "How do I Love Thee?", Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
4) Compare and contrast Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the
similarities in their attitudes towards love and men.