Tilling an Upland Ground:
Edna St. Vincent Millay and
Regionalism
] oann Gardner
If Edna Millay is associated with any region at all, it is with coastal Maine
where she grew up and to which she returned on various occasions as an adult.
When that geography appears in her poems, it creates a focus that distinguishes
her from her European predecessors, after whom her work is modeled and with
whom she is often compared. I am thinking of poems such as "Journal," in which
she speaks of a trip from Orr's to Ragged Island, in Casco Bay:
and the wind blowing up, and a wicked swell, and me
Pitched and sliding and banged by the wave under the bow
(CP, 528-9)*
or Sonnet XXXVI, in which she compares her angry reaction to a friend with the
wind off Matinicus Island:
With slapping skirts the island women stand
In gardens stripped and scattered, peering north,
The wind of their endurance ...
Flattened your words against your speaking mouth.
(CP, 665)
These are not the expressions of a Tennyson or a Keats but of a distinctly American writer, one whose experience of coastal life gave her a unique and compelling
perspective. The irregularity of the waves, the bleak determinatioI). of island women
reinforce the impact of these poems, and her ability to render this landscape conVincingly helps us identify the poet with the place. l
~Un~ess Otherwise indicated, all quotations are from Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay, and page
Un)
ers are ind icated from that volume.
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nUIng an Upland Ground: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Regionalism
45
But Millay spent the better part of h er life in New York-first, as an under_
graduate at Vassar College, then, as a member of a group of young artists in Green_
wich Village, and, finally, as the proprietor of a seven-hundred-acre farm in
Austerlitz, New York. What effect, if any, did these changes h ave on her writing,
and did her poetry written from these localities ever reveal the same passion and
sense of belonging that she demonstrated for coastal Maine? To answer these questions, we must see how much of the physical shows up in her writing, how central
geography is to her overall purpose, and how faithfully it is rendered. Biography
plays a role in this process, the relationship between the poet's life and her stylistic choices, the proximity of her own experience to the experience of the poem.
More important, however, is the believability and the impact of the image and
the language she used to create it. To the extent that Millay made sense of her
surroundings and wrote vividly and uniquely about them, she may be considered a
regionalist of New York.
But first a caution: Millay was a traditionalist with respect to form, which
meant that she was more interested in universal concepts than in personally
grounded events. Whatever of the personal went into her work, it was invariably
transformed, so that the speaker and the individual creating the poem were distinct, and the space the poem occupied belonged to that ideal literary dimension
of A ll-Time, All-Where. There may have been a connection between the poet's
life and the experience she depicted, but it was distanced by her use of figurative
language and an avoidance of concrete imagery.
There are, however, traces of direct sensual engagement in Millay's poetry,
and these traces suggest a personal connection that attests to regional underpinnings. Following her progress from her arrival in New York City to her death at
Steepletop in 1950, we can gauge her intimacy with these places and the role they
played in her writing. We can also speculate on the relationship of politics to
regional concerns, and offer a new perspective on the aesthetic conflict that contributed to her decline. Because Millay experienced such success as a young
Romantic writer, she was ill-prepared for the challenges of her mature years.
Barnard College (New York City)
Edna Millay's first venture into New York was as a special student at Barnard
College, which she attended from February to June, 1913. Prior to her arrival, she
had gained considerable attention with the publication of her poem "Renascence"
in The Lyric Year. This account of life, death, and resurrection brought her praise
- - - - -- - - -- - - - - - - - - - - -- - -- - ---------46
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from
.
tnt
writers and editors across the country and established her as a talented poet
he Transcendentalist school.
"Renascence" began in a landscape consistent with her home in Camden,
Maine (specifically, with the view from the top of Mt. Battie, looking inland,
[hen down on Penobscot Bay), but it quickly left these landmarks behind in favor
of a more generalized experience. The perfunctory music of the opening conveyed
[he speaker's sense of containment, affirming a more-or-less dutiful description
amounting to boredom:
All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay ...
(CP, 13)
What made "Renascence" attractive to readers was the poet's ability to move
gracefully from the physical to the metaphysical without disrupting credibility.
This universalizing tendency identified Millay with poetry in the grand style. A
mystical Romantic, she had a taste for abstraction and managed the transition
from earthly to divine experience without self-consciousness. In the course of the
poem the reader is led to imagine a series of otherworldly ideas: the sky's vastness,
the weight of the world's suffering, death, rebirth, and, ultimately, union with
God. The most lyrical moments of "Renascence" grew out of these ideas, including the conclusion which claims the possibility of transcendence.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat-the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.
(CP, 13)
Clearly, Millay was not a "flat soul," but an intelligent young woman with a
great deal of spiritual resourcefulness. Hearing the poem read at the Whitehall
Inn in Camden before it appear.e d in print, Carolyn Dow, Director of the National
Iraining School of the YWCA, concurred, and she decided to give Millay a chance
to escape her surroundings. She urged her to apply for a scholarship for college and
--------------------------------------'TIlling an Upland Ground: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Regionalism
47
promised to provide funds for other expenses. Dow helped set Millay up in New
York City so that she could take preparatory courses at Barnard, and she used her
connections in the academic world to ease the transition from country promise to
ivory-tower sophistication. At about the same time, The Lyric Year appeared, and
readers began to hail "Renascence" as the best poem in the volume.2 Thus, Millay
arrived in New York with somewhat more star power than the usual girl from Maine.
From all accounts, she fit well into New York society and found the energy of
the city intoxicating. Louis Untermeyer had expressed his admiration for her work
and asked her to call on him at his home. Sara Teasdale invited her to tea. The
young Nicaraguan poet Salom6n de la Selva squired her about town. Millay also
established friendships with several of her peers who had greatly admired "Renascence"-particularly with Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Bynner, two Harvard
graduates who had received early poetic recognition. This was heady success for
someone who had completed high school with nowhere in particular to go, and the
pleasure of being so welcomed made her welcoming in return.
While still more at home in rural landscapes, Millay was obviously smitten by
New York life. As she wrote home to her family in February, 1913,3 she had seen
everything from her window, and she recorded the visual stimulation with great enthusiasm. There were buildings, "eight stories to million and billion stories"; laundry on rooftops or strung between houses, "they flap and flap!"; children roller-skating and playing tag; smokestacks, windows and signs everywhere, "way up high on
the tops of factories and cars and taxicabs"; and, of course, noise: "In New York you
can see the noise." Millay's desire to express exactly what it was like to her family
suggests her growing interest in this place and her realization that some of what she
saw could be translated into art.
In at least one poem from this period she did so, speculating on personal loss in
the impersonal city. The sonnet "If! should learn," was published in Renascence and
Other Poems in 1917:
If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return againRead from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train, ...
(CP,565)
As backdrop for this imagined circumstance, in which her lover "happen[s] to be
killed," she includes details from her surroundings: avenues and newspapers, subway stations and lights, the bustle of people on sidewalks and the emotional distancing that comes from anonymous crowds. The pain of loss is upstaged by the
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.
f advertising, the hype of consumerism, the public concern for appearance
ubstance,
and this inner confl ict is contained in fourteen iambic pentamover S
'nes as if the form itself provided emotional discipline. The argument one
ete r l, '
might expect from the sonnet-the celebration of love, the theme of carpe diem,
the assumption of an ordered universe-has also changed to reflect this fast-paced
and emotionally indifferent society. Love or the loss of love is no longer of primary
importance. Emotions are not to be sung out or cried over, at least not on street
corners, and certainly not with old-fashioned sturm und drang. The appearance of
calm, the controlled focus on details, the haphazardness of the situation indicate
an urban consciousness, someone who has adapted to circumstances and learned
g1,tZ 0
how to use them expressively.
This new grounding in the physical aspects of the city gave her conventional
forms an unconventional edge. She would not always work from or express delight in these surroundings, but when she did, she attracted positive attention,
both as a skilled technician and as a representative voice. Her brief stay in New
York prepared her socially and poetically for her future, establishing a taste for the
"modern" and setting the stage for her return after graduation from Vassar College
in 1917. Back in Camden the summer before Vassar, she asked Arthur Ficke to
write when he got to N ew York, "It's a lot different from Iowa to me now, -just
across the yard, you know, in everything but distance." (CL, July 12, 1913,47)
Vassar College (Poughkeepsie)
Millay went to Vassar College in the fall of 1913 and found it far less interesting than either New York or Camden. Her liberal upbringing, coupled with
her early poetic success, meant that she was unlikely to fit in with or accept
student life as it came to h er. She wanted more from school than book-learning,
and she looked to her physical surroundings for fulfillment. A letter she wrote to
Arthur Ficke soon after settling in confirms her disappointment. "I hate this
pink-and-gray college," she announced, "It isn't on the Hudson .... It isn't anywhere near the Hudson. Every path in Poughkeepsie ends in a heap of cans and
rubbish" (CL, 48). Water was important to her, offering an emotional connection to her youth, and the Hudson River connected her with life downstream.
Not being able to see it seemed a cheat, and the blue-collar commonness of
Poughkeepsie reinforced her frustration.
Growing up, Millay had been ~ble to live independently, without serious
challenges to her will, but college could be an efficient leveler. Because of Vassar's
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49
relative isolation, she had to depend on it for much of her intellectual and artis _
tic growth. This situation had immediate drawbacks, particularly since it lim._
ited her choices and distanced her from the environment she had just begun to
appreciate and understand. She chafed at the social restrictions, and she was
not at all shy about voicing her disapproval. "They trust us in everything but
men," she complained, "-and they let us see it, so that it's worse than nOt
trusting us at all" (CL, 49).
While Millay eventually began to take part in campus events, she never let
go of her contempt for these policies. In class, her rebellion was manifested in
challenges to her professors. According to her biographer, Miriam Gurko: "She
frequently interrupted the work of the class ... to ask acute questions or to point
out what seemed to her to be ... errors." Outside of class, it resulted in a simple
failure to comply: "She refused to take attendance requirements seriously and took
pleasure in inventing deliberately far-fetched excuses for her continual absence
from classes or chapel" (Gurko, 55). The poet, it seems, needed inspiration for her
poems, and she could get only so much from books.
The one compromise Millay did make, aside from remaining to take her degree, was to season her attacks with liberal doses of sarcasm. This concession made
her seem less like a spoiled adolescent and more like a clever adult, able to rise
above the fray with a certain Wildean flippancy. In "Why Did I Ever Come to
This Place?," a poem published in A Book of Vassar Verse (1917), she portrays her
reaction to Vassar by equating school policy with the sound of the chapel bell.
This usually dignified reminder of time passing becomes in the poem a comic
tunelessness, a clock that does its duty without regard to accuracy or change. Her
criticism is mitigated by a focus not so much on the grimness of her situation as on
its ridiculousness:
And again,
When the chapel chimes,
Forgetting that it is TOWN SUNDAY,
(Or uninformed)
Ding,
That is to say, "peal,"
For quite some time,
As blithe,
And inexorable,
And out of tune,
As anybody else in a bath-tub ...
(A Book of Vassar Verse, 163-4)
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Beneath her amusement, however, lies a serious political question, one that
d beyond the poet's own private discomfort. When the bells chime, she
rea Ch e
way and stares at the wall, which happens to be "scarred/ by generations of
turns a
thumbtacks." This sight calls to mind those hundreds of women who have preher in this posture, a vision which, in turn, suggests a larger questionceded
What were they doing there anyway? As the refrain ironically suggests, the adage
concerning a woman's place seemed correct-but for none of the usual reasons:
And I say to myself,
Or to the servant who comes in just then
To empty the waste-basket,
That college
Is the misapprehension
Of a June-bug mind,
And that a woman's place
Is in the home.
(A Book of Vassar Verse, 163- 4)
Needless to say, Millay never fully embraced Vassar life, but spent four years
there in an uneasy truce with its president. That her sister Kathleen enrolled at the
school the semester after Vincent graduated indicates that her contempt for Vassar
was not as deep as it seemed. Much of her behavior was calculated to draw attention
to herself as a poet and to distinguish her situation from that of the average undergraduate. She was, after all, older and more experienced than most, and she had
solid accomplishments. Throughout her time there, she continued to write, pulling
together the poems that would constitute her first book (Renascence and Other Poems, 1917). She also became involved in Vassar's theater productions and penned
some occasional poems to go along with important campus events. One such piece
Was the Baccalaureate Hymn, for which Millay wrote both the music and the words.
The solemnity of this composition and her pleasure performing it hardly suggest the
rebelliousness that had marked her undergraduate career:
Lord, Lord! We cried of old, who now before Thee,
Stricken with prayer, shaken with praise, are dumb;
Father accept our worship when we least adore Thee,
And when we call Thee not, oh, hear and come!
(CP,404)4
--nW
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Greenwich Village (New York City)
After graduation, Millay moved to Greenwich Village where she became associated with the Provincetown Players and supported herself by various writing
projects. Her second book of poems, A Few Figs From Thistles, appeared in 1920
and, according to Gurko, established her not only as "the poet laureate of the
nineteen-twenties" (123) but as "the embodiment of the gay spirit of the Village"
(125). A Few Figs was quickly followed by Second April (1921), which, if largely
rural in its settings, also demonstrated that same breezy attitude associated With
the young artists then frequenting the cafes and restaurants of the Village:
My Candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friendsIt gives a lovely light!
(CP, 127)
Millay's return to New York was in effect a return to freedom: freedom of
movement, freedom of choice. It was also an opportunity to develop as a poet and
to establish more clearly her own identity. She settled into this landscape as if it
were home, her art and her life drawing on the energy of the city. Her obvious
affection for this geography, h er ability to respond to it naturally, made her a remarkable and much remarked-on figure-the red-haired poet whose unique qualification was that she was both brazen and female.
Significantly, this brand of urban regionalism required only minimal acknowledgment of the physical environment. More important were the people who lived
there and the particular way they approached relationships. Poems could be situated in rural landscapes, or in no landscapes at all, but they had to convey the
energy, defiance, and, yes, the flippancy of the new consciousness. Largely a holdover from the decadence of the 1890s, this art valued artifice over the organic,
qualified enthusiasm with urbane weariness, and delighted in breaking rules. It
found a likely proponent in Edna Millay, whose bad-girl temperament pushed the
limits of female propriety. She became the representative love poet for this consciousness-a female romantic, who both celebrated and bemoaned love's transience in her own off-handed manner.
The poem "Macdougal Street," with fruit-carts and clam-carts, women squatting on stoops, filth and clutter, conveys a reliable sense of postwar Greenwich
Village. It describes a sidewalk encounter between a wealthy man and a street
urchin (who apparently swears at him in Italian) and ends with the poet's sympa-
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. 'dentification with the little girl. "Macdougal Street" flirts heavily with
the Uc I
. entality but captures that defiance of convention in the speaker's parenntllll
'
se . I wish to be "a ragged child with ear-rings in my ears!" (132) Thus, the
ca
[heU
..,
.
.
.
tic identiftcatlon WIth common man-In thIS case, woman-surfaces In
Roma n
Millay's adult expression.
"Recuerdo" is a better known and perhaps a more successful poem that delivers the requisite breeziness while managing to include some recognition of place.
It first appeared in Harriet Monroe's Poetry in May 1919 and later served as one of
the opening poems in A Few Figs From Thistles. According to Gurko (50), the
poem grew out of a trip the poet took to Staten Island with Salomon de la Selva,
but it could have been prompted, too, by a similar outing with Floyd Dell and
John Reed in the fall of 1918. 5 Whatever the case, the poem breaks with reader
expectations by beginning each stanza with the refrain, and it establishes the mixture of exhilaration and fatigue that made her poetry and her artistic persona so
compelling:
We were very tired, we were very merryWe had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
(CP, 128)
In the remaining four lines of each stanza, Millay evokes sights, sounds, tastes,
and smells encountered on this journey, without trying too hard to confine the
experience to a single biographical event. Indeed, her ultimate goal seems not so
much to call up the event itself as to create an artistic moment, part of which
involves a celebration of forgetfulness:
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
(CP, 128)
The sensuous beauty of nature is complemented by the beauty of the human parf'
blclpants who ignore tiresome responsibility in favor of adventure. The values
ehtnd this behavior are not discipline and restraint, as was taught at Vassar, but
a hedonism more in line with Millay's own instincts. The couple in the poem
eXtend t h elr
. reve I throughout the night and on into the next day, ignoring the
USual
.
requIrements of sleep. When they do come home, they have thoroughly
eXe . d
rClse their bohemian spirit and have established their independence from
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ng an Upland Ground: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Regionalism
53
conventional, workaday folk. This distinction is punctuated by their encOunter
with a street woman, whose situation is romanticized by their joviality as well as
their assumed connection:
We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered
head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
(CP, 128)
The only aspect of civilized life that continues to be necessary, apparently, is transportation.
To this point, New York had freed Millay's creative energy. It soon began to
wear on her as well. The noise, the bustle, the competitiveness of city life made
it difficult for h er to concentrate or to gain any respite from human intensities.
She began to miss the country, and her health began to deteriorate. The buildings and the concrete made her feel confined-a sensation Millay had little
patience for-and some of this frustration began to appear in her writing.
In "City Trees" from Second April (1921), the poet acknowledges her physical surroundings, but less to affirm them than to express their limitations. The
message is that these trees (like this human being) are no different from trees in
the country; they would make as sweet a sound (would be as happy) as country
trees if we could hear them above the din. The tone is nostalgic for the world
she has left behind, the human being identifying with the natural object that
seems so regrettably out of place:
The trees along this city street,
Save for the traffic and the trains,
Would make a sound as thin and sweet
As trees in country lanes.
(CP, 54)
As the final stanza implies, the poet's understanding comes from having experienced similar sensations herself. Surrounded by concrete and assaulted by the
noise of the city, she, too, has lost her song. She knows what the trees would
sound like outside of this environment because she knows how she would sound,
and, in her desire to hear them, she watches, remembering the clarity and the
harmony of the natural world:
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Oh, little leaves that are so dumb
Against the shrieking city air,
I watch you when the wind has come,I know what sound is there.
(CP, 54)
Millay no longer received from New York the inspiration she needed. Indeed,
her letters from this time show a growing desire for change. Writing to her mother
on December 20, 1920, she explains her failure to keep in touch by saying that she
had been sick, -"bronchitis for a while, and another small nervous breakdown"evidence of the stress that such a lifestyle brought on. Now that she had recovered, she had decided that she needed to move on, as much for her work as for
anything else. "I am becoming sterile here," she says, "I have known it wo uld be,
& I see it approaching if I stay here.-Also, New York life is getting too congested
for me,-toO many people; I get no time to work" (CL, 105-106).
Steepletop (Austerlitz, New York)
In January, 1921, Millay embarked on an extended trip to Europe that would
put her in touch with the artistic currents of the day and broaden her cultural
horizons. It would also exhaust her, both physically and mentally.6 When she returned in February, 1923, she was more determined than ever to lead a bucolic
life. While she did rent a small apartment on Waverly Place, her choice of the city
as spiritual center was essentially at an end. Ready for new surroundings, new
approaches to poetry, she found the vehicle for change in Eugen Jan Boissevain.
In early spring, she went ~ith her friend Esther Root for a weekend in Croton-an-Hudson, where a number of Greenwich Villagers had purchased property.
One evening, while playing charades at Dudley Malone's,1 she met and fell in love
With the charming Dutch businessman, widower of the American feminist Inez
Milholland. On July 18,1923, she and Eugen were married, just hours before she
Was admitted to a New York hospital for surgery.s Soon afterwards, she and her
new husband began searching for their own country retreat and found it further
north in the Taconic Hills near the Massachusetts border.
Edna and Eugen bought the farmhouse they named "Steeple top" in the spring
~f 1925 and, after major renovations and modernizing, moved in June. This would
e their home and center of operations for the next twenty-five years, and Millay's
Poetry reflected the difference it made through changes in perspective, tone, set-
---~~
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ng an Upland Ground: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Regionalism
55
ting, and mood. Here, the noise, bustle, and artificiality of the city gave way to a
more rooted expression, one more genuinely in touch with the organic. For the
first time since her youth, she was surrounded by a rich n atural landscape, one With
which she could identify and from which she could draw her metaphors. The need
for ironic distance was gone, as was the flippancy that had kept her from experienc_
ing her life deeply. She began to pay less attention to her artistic persona and more
to what was happening around her, partly because she was maturing, partly because
her new circumstances pleased and inspired her.
Her letters of this period display great enthusiasm for h er new ho me. She
talks of the h ost of workers hired to create order out of chaos , the lush aSSOrt_
ment of n atural stimuli, as well as the smattering of ani mals and pets. "Here
we are," sh e writes to h er mother soon after moving in, "in one of the love liest
places in the world." "We are crazy abo ut it," she adds, "& I h ave so many
things on my mind .. .l h ardly know if I am writing with a pen or a screwdriver" (C L, 194).
The industry and enthusiasm of her domestic life was complemented by
recent professional successes. In 1923 , sh e h ad been awarded the Pulitzer Prize
for Poetry. H er new book h ad been enthusiastically rece ived, securing her status as a major American poet. She was doing we ll financially, and she was
happily married to a man who believed that her career took precedent over
his own.
One poem from this period, h oweve r, catches Millay in a somber mood,
suggesting that some aspects of her past h ad n o t yet been resolved . Published
in The Buck in the Snow (1928 ), "Mist in the Valley" speaks of her love for the
sea, the pain of living at a distance from it, and the way this landscape "hurts"
her by reminding her of what it does no t h ave. The importance of this sentiment lies not so much in what it claims as in what it does, even though the
poet h erself did no t seem to realize it. The crucial image develops in the third
and fourth stanzas out of a seemingly straightforward description. The miracle
comes at the end of the two stanzas when she suddenly connects this landscape with one she h asn't known since h er youth in Maine:
These hills, beneath the October moon,
Sit in the valley white with mist
Like islands in a quiet bay,
Jut out from shore into the mist,
Wooded with poplar dark as pine,
Like points of land into a quiet bay.
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(Just in that way
The harbour met the bay)
(CP,223)
What seems important about "Mist in the Valley," with respect to Millay's
of place, is that "these hills," covered with pinxter and loud with the
sense
blackbird's cry, recall that view from the top of Mt. Battie with such intensity.
While this vision is identified as harmful (because it gives pain) and as incomplete (because the sea is absent), the experience demonstrates the power of
poetry to overcome obstacles by transporting the reader to the place she yearns
for yet cannot occupy. The mature writer, however, is more modern in her
diction, more relaxed in her cadences, than the Romantic poet of "Renascence."
She also narrates a more credible story, one consistent with the physics, rather
than the metaphysics, of the moment. One landscape gives way to another,
and the primary revelation is of the emotion itself. While the poem ends with
regret over wasted time, the catharsis depends on the ability to call up the past
with the intensity of immediate experience while remaining firmly rooted in
the present:
Stricken too sore for tears,
I stand, remembering the islands and the sea's lost sound ....
Life at its best no longer than the sand-peep's cry,
And I two years, two years,
Tilling an upland ground!
(CP,223-4)
Millay must have come to.terms with this upland landscape, finding in it the
peace and sensual richness she needed to create. Her work suggests as much,
offering details from her daily life and savoring its many dimensions. There are
birds in her poems, from the potent hawk to the domestic robin and wren. There
are a multitude of trees, weeds, and herbs as well as vegetables and flowers-all of
which could be found in the woods and fields surrounding her house. Her allusions to oak, beech, birch, maple, hemlock give us a sampling of the forest in
which she lived, and the various fruits and grains (apples, grapes, quinces, plums,
corn, red-top, buckwheat, rye) offer an idea of the crops the farm produced. These
Images rise from experience and succeed poetically to the extent that they generate emotion. Millay's strategy of alluding to them by name suggests their value.
They are not preludes to abstraction, but natural objects that populate and characterize this previously unexpressed space.
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57
"The Buck in the Snow" offers a scene familiar to local inhabitants. The
poem's imagery is introduced by a question, as if the poet were speaking to neigh.
bors who had stopped by for a chat:
Saw you not at the beginning of evening the antlered buck
and his doe
Standing in the apple-orchard? I saw them. I saw them suddenly go,
Tails up, with long leaps lovely and slow,
Over the stone-wall into the wood of hemlocks bowed with snow.
(CP, 228)
The diction here is not that of speech, but the lines have a suppleness suggestive
of speech, and the music-much less rigid than earlier in her career-adapts to
changes in mood and scene. The poem ends with the dissolution of the cameo,
the buck's death, and the expressive gaze of the survivor:
-a mile away by now, it may be,
Under the heavy hemlocks that as the moments pass
Shift their loads a little, letting fall a feather of snowLife, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.
(CP, 228)
In the process of adapting to this rural landscape, Millay has learned important lessons about observation. She has also learned about death and the role it
plays in nature. This consciousness of the brevity of life, the conditional aspect of
beauty, makes her focus more intently and realistically on the experience itselfcapturing gesture, scene and mood in a unique and sensuous image.
Other poems speak of her life at "Steeple top" and help root her expression in
the actual. "Winter Night" describes preparation for the evening story-telling session, a ritual that increased in importance to the degree that they were isolated
from the outside world. In winter especially, the hearth became a focal point for
human interaction. Keeping the fire burning was a lengthy and difficult chore:
The day has gone to hewing and felling,
Sawing and drawing wood to the dwelling
(CP, 245)
The warmth and safety that resulted from this labor, the social intercourse and
intellectual exchange it stimulated, made the effort worthwhile:
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Here are question and reply,
And the fire reflected in the thinking eye.
So peace, and let the bob-cat cry.
(CP, 245)
"Thanksgiving Dinner" focuses on the relationship between the woman and the
not the less valuable for its lack of high drama and romance. Again, the poet
rna n ,
demonstrates her evolving attitude through new points of reference. The rhythms
and diction of this poem are simpler than before, and the homely imagery reflects
a neW humility:
I wi ll cook for my love a banquet of beets and cabbages,
For my clever love , who has returned from further than
the far east
Leeks, potatoes, turnips, all such fruits ...
We will laugh like spring above the steaming, stolid winter roots.
(CP, 33 0)
This relationship is not a product of "burn[ing her] candle at both ends," but the result
of a lasting, mutual affection and respect. As such, it deserves the effort it takes to
preserve it, both as a human experience and as an occasion for art. In contrast to the
vegetables she prepares, her love provides the color and promise of spring, but it is
nourished by these winter roots, taking from them the strength necessary for survival.
Overall, these poems offer snapshots of the poet's life on a Northeastern N ew
York farm. Their importance rests in their simplicity. This country environment is
complete, sensible in itself, and these moments are del ivered without intervening
personality or embellishment" capturing the particularity of regional reference.
One remarkable poem in this vein is "From a Train Window," which renders
the view from a train window on the route between Boston and Albany.9Uncharacteristically, Millay identifies her poem with a specific name as if that identification were important:
Precious in the light of the early sun the Housatonic
Between its not unscalable mountains flows.
Precious in the January morning the shabby fur of the cattails by the stream.
The farmer driving his horse to the feed-store for a sack of
cracked corn
Is not in haste; there is no whip in the socket.
(CP, 280)
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In the second stanza, the scene changes, following the speaker's gaze. While this
view is potentially grimmer, calling to mind human mortality, the serenity of the
first stanza carries through:
Pleasant enough, gay even, by no means sad
Is the rickety graveyard on the hill. Those are not cypress trees
Perpendicular among the lurching slabs, but cedars from
the neighbourhood,
Native to this rocky land, self-sown.
(CP,280)
Ease is built into the landscape. The morning sun does not blind or glare. The
mountains are not so imposing as to be "unscalable." Even the farmer, driving his
horse to the store, is "not in haste." The graveyard also is removed from harshness,
because the cedars dotting that enclosure are native and "self-sown." Correspondingly, the poet's diction has relaxed, the rhyme and the galloping rhythms have
disappeared, and a cadence approximating American speech has taken over. Even
though the syntactical inversions are still evident (and even the British spelling),
we know precisely where we are in this poem; it is not in the generic poeto-sphere
of Shelley's skylark or Keats's Grecian urn. This is a landscape in which the speaker
participates, one which she knows closely enough to depict in intimate terms.
The lesson she derives from this scene (that death is a part of Nature and, thus,
should not be feared) is convincing because it comes from the landscape and is an
honest rendering of what she sees.
****
Critics date Millay's decline in popularity from the period following The HarpWeaver (1920), blaming it on her attempt to include politics in her art or on her
failure to modernize herself sufficiently. But such a conclusion ignores the concerns of regionalism and the way Millay's decline depended on more than a change
in taste. To the extent that she moved beyond her own self-importance and focused
on the particulars of place, she produced a poetry that was honest and compelling.
She had grown considerably since her poetic debut and she had taken risks. An
independent spirit, she did not accept critical limitations, nor did she stoOp to
follow trends. Instead, she addressed subjects she felt compelled to address, often
with deadly seriousness.
Her decision to write politically was not in itself a mistake, but the assumPtion that politics made "bad art" was. Her poetry and her life had always been
interconnected in that she lived with the same intensity she generated in her
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oems, and many of her poems had their origin in experience. But "having their
P 'n in experience" is different from being "identical to." The process that trans-
ongl
[ s life into art worked against politics. Politics depended on facts, literal statelorm
and linear logic. To the extent that poetry seeks beauty and politics seeks
men,t
change, the two modes of expression did not have much in common. The attempt
[0 combine them, so she thought, required considerable compromise.
Millay had worked on loosening her diction so that it would appear more
natural, but she had not done so consistently, and she did not realize how the
precisely drawn image could be more persuasive than either direct argument or
literary abstraction. lo In a way, her failure to be regional in the most complete
sense of the term may have caused her unraveling. She could not connect with
the present moment without intimate experience of it, and she could not render
that experience artistically without coming to terms with the sensuous image.
Her conviction that poetry took place in a dimension apart from the actual had
changed since the days of "Renascence," but still she relied on Romantic conventions, poetic (or archaic) diction, and figurative language to communicate her
ideas. She continued to favor generalized landscapes over the specific and actual,
and she identified timeless circumstances with the universal aspirations of art.
"Justice Denied in Massachusetts" demonstrates some of the difficulties Millay
had in applying politics to poetry. I I Published in The Buck in the Snow (1928),
"Justice Denied" was written from personal experience-or, at least, from genuine
concern for the experience of others. While it seemed successfu l as a poem, it did
not produce change. The case was that of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti,
the Italian anarchists accused of murdering a paymaster and an armed guard during a robbery of a South Braintree, Massachusetts shoe factory. For seven years,
Millay's attention was drawn to this trial, particularly as she and others came to
believe that the two men were innocent of the crime. In April 1927, Sacco and
Vanzetti were convicted and sentenced to death. In August, she joined a group of
protesters who marched down Beacon Street in Boston, seeking a stay of execution.
To this point, Millay had acted as an ordinary United States citizen, exercising her right to disagree. But the force of her argument was enhanced by her
identity as a poet and her status as a representative voice. Predictably, Millay was
arrested along with other protesters, and, after having posted bail, she gained an
audience with Governor Fuller. While the Governor promised to consider her
~eas, he did not consider them long, nor did he stay the execution. That evening,
V ill ay read "Justice Denied" to the assembled protesters, shortly before Sacco and
anZettl were put to death. As shdater confessed to Grace King, the incident had
--nlli
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61
"increased her scorn for the American public and deepened her disillusionment
with mankind" (Brittin, 22).
But her own failure-the failure of poetry to render the desired result-was
also at issue. Millay's power as a poet had been tested, and it had come up short.
True, her physical involvement had not changed anything either, but poetry_
that visionary experience that could "split the sky in two';And let the face of God
shine through"-poetry should have mattered. That it h ad not meant either that
her own skill had been lacking, that poetry itself could not serve political ends, or
that the people involved in this judgment were too spiritually blighted to recog_
nize or act on the Truth. Temporarily at least, she settled for the last explanation,
although the poem itself reveals gu ilt and a concern for her own responsibility.
"Justice Denied in Massachusetts" was more ironically incisive than anything
Millay had written in the past, perhaps because it dealt with an issue far more
serious than her own personal discomfort. In pointing to the bias implicit in the
judge's ruling, she also implicated those who had let that verdict stand, and, in
that group, she included herse lf. "Let us abandon then our gardens and go home,"
she announced at the opening of the poem. "Not in our dayl Shall the cloud go
over and the sun rise as before." Let us all give up because the destructive forces
now have the upper hand. The promise inherited from our forebears of a rich
harvest and a healthy soc iety has been denied, and the process of destruction is
already well under way:
What from the splendid dead
We have inheritedFurrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subduedSee now the slug and the mildew plunder.
(CP,231)
The poet's guilt grows as the poem proceeds and her use of the third-person
plural suggests the royal "we." (We have inherited the responsibility. We have
seen the failure; Let us then sit and give up.) The autobiographical connection is
also furthered by the metaphor of husbandry, which places the poem in a setting
similar to that at "Steepletop." Still, her argument filters its emotion through
symbols that must be interpreted to be understood. (The "slug and the mil deW"
evoke the corruption that eats away at the social order; the "we" of the poem, the
cultivators of the land, are citizens who must oppose it.) Her ability, thus, to give
her reader an immediate, emotion al response is diminished by the intellectualizing process. We are made to feel uncomfortable, but we don 't know why, and we
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don't know what to do about it. Aside from the title, we are not situated in a
literal landscape, and what we take away is the message to give up, which is more
an expression of the speaker's frustration than a viable or intended solution.
The failure, as Millay presents it, was not one of passivity but of inappropriate
tools. In her own situation, the words, the methods, and the assumptions with
which she wrote had not lived up to their promise. This perception permeates the
poem since technical choices, whether deliberately or not, model what went wrong.
The agricultural metaphor is appropriate, but it does not communicate the intensity or the particularity of the poet's feelings. The focus is not on the event itself,
but on an imaginary occurrence that "takes place" far away from that Massachusetts courtroom. Millay knew what was at stake when she struggled to frame her
argument, but she did not know how to respond. Instead of generating her imagery from the event itself, she chose symbolic recreation and drew her conclusions
long before Sacco's and Vanzetti's fates were sealed. Composing "Justice Denied"
in the days before the march, she knew (or chose to believe) that her words would
not bring about the desired change. Poetry would not convince the court to spare
these men's lives, and this realization caused her despair:
let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting-room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
leaving to our children's children this beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.
(CP, 231)
Despite her failure in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, Millay went on to write
POlitical poems, principally in response to German aggression leading up to WWIl.
Most of these expressions were collected in Make Bright the Arrows (1940), which
she herself believed was little more than diatribe (el, 311, to Charlotte Babcock
Sills. Once again, she was putting her poetic reputation on the line, and, this time
poetic beauty was sacrificed to the idea of practical change. Although very few of
these poems made it into her collected works, Make Bright the Arrows was not a
complete disaster. There are a number of pleasing poems there, and her political
POSition was not as distasteful as, say, the rantings of Ezra Pound, whose broadcasts
OVer Radio Rome led to his indictment for treason. Her mistake was more in the
domain of literary politics: her choice to privilege meter and rhyme over natural
diction when natural diction would have made the point:
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Stock well the quiver
With arrows bright:
The bowman feared
Need never fight.
(Make Bright the Arrows, VI)
Or her willingness to sacrifice the historical weightiness and lyricism of the sonnet for an awkward prosiness that made her seem unskilled:
When the day comes (that the Conservative
Party retain its prominence, and he
And a few friends their ancient property,
Trout-stream and shooting-box, and chance to live
A few more gouty winters)
(Make Bright the Arrows, Sonnet VIII, 64)
In other words, her doubts about the power of poetry to move or change events
were mirrored in a technical indecisiveness that compromised the beauty of her
art and the authority of h er voice.
Underneath it all, Millay suspected that politics and poetry could not be combined-that either the politics or the poetry would suffer as a result. This did not
change her desire to exerc ise an opinion on events, or to use what skills she had to
convince others of her views, but it made her resigned to compromise and to
absorbing the punishment for her mistakes. Writing to her old college friend,
Charlotte Babcock Sills, in 1941, she explained,
I have one thing to give in the service of my country,
- my reputation as a poet. How many more books of
propaganda ... that reputation can withstand without
falling under the weight of it and without becoming
irretrievably lost, I do not know.
(Cl,311-3 12)
If Millay h ad learned to ground her politics in sensuous images and to pull
those images from the landscape, she would have been forgiven, even by those
who did not particularly want her to succeed. But she did not learn, perhaps because she was still emotionally connected to those ideas and meth ods that had
brought her initial success. Perhaps, too, the politics of poetry had placed her in a
position in which she could ill afford to concede. She did not like the technical
experiments of the Modernists, their politics or their personalities, and had spent
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ears representing what was to her a more dignified alternative. 12 Taking
manY Y
from them, giving in to their values, would be admitting defeat. And she
cue
1 S
did, after all, very much appreciate traditional values. In August, 1946, following
hospitalization in New York for another nervous breakdown, she wrote to Edmund
Wilson that she had been memorizing poems: Matthew Arnold's "Scholar Gypsy,"
Keats'S "The Eve of St. Agnes," and Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" among
them. In spite of the reversals of recent years, she was arming herself for future
challenges and bolstering her courage for the days to come. As she tells her old
friend, "I have [memorized] them all, now. And what evil thing can ever again
even brush me with its wings?" (CL, 334).
Notes
1.
Part of the impact of the "Journal" passage rests in Millay's vocabulary. Her use of "wicked" to
Inean ((large," Uexaggerated" or "very" rather than "evil" is unique to Maine, the only region
where "wicked good" continues to make sense.
2.
The editor, Ferdinand Earle, thought "Renascence" deserved the $500 prize for best poem, but
the judges eventually awarded the prize to Orrick Johns. Johns and others expressed their dismay that such an "outstanding" poem was not recognized.
3.
February 6, 1913, in Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay, 32. (Hereafter identified as Cl)
4.
Millay had been banned from graduation for having gone absent without leave too many times.
Her peers, however, protested vociferously, and the punishment was rescinded. Following the
ceremony, Millay wrote home to her sister Norma, "Commencement went off beautifully & I
had a wonderful time" (Cl, 64)
5.
Dell and Reed were associated with the socialist magazine, Masses. They were celebrating the
rumor that an armistice would soon be signed ending WWI. Having listened to Reed tell of his
adventures as poet, journalist, and war correspondent, Millay told him, "I love you for the
dangers you have passed." (Quoted from Gurko, 105.)
6.
American writers were leaving the United States in great numbers, hoping to find in Europe
the freedom of expression they claimed to miss at home. Millay went over as foreign correspondent for Vanity Fair, and, for two years, recorded reflections on her travels through France,
England, Italy, Austria, and Hungary. According to Floyd Dell, she had an affair with a French
violinist in Paris and then had an abortion in England. (Brittin, 15)
7.
Malone and his wife Doris Stevens were suffragists.
8.
Gurko reports that she was operated on for "a serious intestinal ailment." (155) The symptoms
seem consistent with Crohn's disease, which causes cramps, intestinal bleeding, and anemia. If
left untreated, it can lead to death.
9.
10.
II.
The New Haven Railroad runs from Canaan, Connecticut, along the Housatonic River to
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where it turns west to the New York State line (near Austerlitz) and
then runs northwest to Albany.
I am referring to the image as her rivals, the Imagistes, would define it, as "direct treatment of
the thing."
She had always been a feminist in temperament, and her poems reflecting her female independence and desire may be seen as political expressions. When she attempted to write directly
about feminism, however, as in her sonnet to Inez Milholland (LXVII), she seems to have
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become tangled in rhetorical comp lications. ("Upon this marble bust that is not [flay the round
formal wreath that is not fame," CP, 627)
,
12.
O n June 22, 1949, she wrote to Cass Canfield that there was "nothing so silly as the ch ildish
horsing around of Eliot, when he is trying to be funny" (Cl, 353). As for Ezra Pound, she
dism issed him by say ing that he was "such a short-we ight pound" (Gurko, 223).
Bibliography
Brittin, Norman A. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.
G urko, Miriam. Restless Spirit: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell,
1962.
Macdougall , A llan Ross, ed .. Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952.
[Cl)
Mi llay, Edna St. Vincent. A Book of Vassar Verse : Reprints from the Vassar Miscellany Monthly, 18941916. Poughkeepsie: Vassar Misce llany Monthly, 1916.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Collected Poems. Ed. Norma Millay. New York: Harper & Row, 1956. [ep)
Mi llay, Edna St. Vincent. Make Bright the Arrows. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940.
Thes ing, William B., ed. Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: G. K. Hall & Co.,
1993.
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