M: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Three Sonnets

One of my favourite books of poetry I own is a very old hardback edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s collected sonnets. It hardly has a title page and the pages are thick and roughly cut. I found it in a second-hand bookshop and on the contents page there’s a handwritten note that reads “To Sue, my better half, Cherie, December 1954”. I can’t help but find that moving every time I see it. I like these two, whoever they were. Likely my grandparents’ generation. What a great present to give to your better half. It’s unintentionally perfect in a book of sonnets too – reading that in 2025 is both sweet and sad at the same time. So long lives this and this gives life to thee, indeed.

Anyway we had a sonnet a couple of weeks ago with Lowell. With apologies to him, and to Donne, Milton, Keats, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Terrance Hayes and other excellent sonneteers throughout the centuries, Millay is my absolute favourite post-Shakespeare sonnet writer. I just think she understands so deeply what both the constraints and affordances of the strict form can do, and I think her joy in them is palpable. She gets that the best sonnets are sweet and flirty and show-offy and profound and witty and devastating, all at once.

I was wondering for this week whether I should do something different: normally I take a slightly longer poem than a 14-line sonnet and I carve it up into stopping-places to comment on what I think is happening. But one way I like to see Millay’s sonnets is as a kind of lifelong project that she kept going back to throughout her career. And one way I like to read sonnets is by considering the very sectioned, rigid structural process they demonstrate and enjoying how that moves across the whole piece. So instead of atomizing one individual sonnet, I’d like to take three different ones and try and justify my possibly outrageous claim that she’s better than Keats, and I’d also like to explore how, in general, sonnets work and why I think they’re so great.

I’m numbering the sonnets based on the book that I’ve got, but the first one is sometimes also known as Sonnet XXX, because it was Sonnet 30 in the collection ‘Fatal Interview’ that Millay published in 1931. I’ve picked three different sonnets to look at because I want to use them to illustrate three main things that the best sonnets have always done since the Renaissance. Here goes:

Things Sonnets Do #1, then: they try to define what love is and how it works. Probably the most famous of these is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, which you hear quite often at weddings – “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.” Here's Millay’s tilt at it.

XCIX

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

First of all, let’s look at the technical stuff. This is a Shakespearean sonnet, which is a way of organizing the 14 lines that differs slightly from the original Italian form, the Petrarchan sonnet (more on this later). Sonnets were an Italian form, already over a century old when Shakespeare started writing his, and they’d already been introduced and re-worked into English by poets a couple of generations before him, notably by Sir Thomas Wyatt. When he wrote his own sequence, Shakespeare kept the basic ‘rules’ – fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, subject matter of love and a ‘volta’ (or ‘turn’ of thought) somewhere after the middle. But Shakespeare also knew that rhyming in English is harder than rhyming in Italian – think of those ‘i’ and ‘o’ endings of Italian words and then think about how much more irregular English sounds are – so he bent the rules and gave himself more leeway with sound. A Shakespearean sonnet usually splits the 14 lines into four different sections – three quatrains, that usually rhyme alternately abab, cdcd, efef, followed by a big finish with a final rhyming couplet. That’s what Millay is modelling here with this one, too.

So what is love, for Millay, in this one, and how do her thoughts and definitions move through the fourteen lines? Well, like Shakespeare, Millay also gets that it’s worth being playful – she fully understands the folly of trying to define an emotion using language, let alone using language that has to follow very rigid rules of rhythm, rhyme and form. But she does it here anyway, I suspect because it’s fun to try.

One clever workaround for the impossibility of pinning down love is to define what it is by saying what it is not: in this case, Millay begins by saying that love is not one of the things that are essential for survival. It’s not food, drink, sleep or shelter. It’s not even a life-preserver for people who are drowning. It doesn’t bring us back to life or cure our sickness. Look how musical and hypnotic her pentameter is, by the way – ‘and rise and sink and rise and sink again’, ‘Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath’ – gorgeous.

But where is this going? This is supposed to be a definition of what love *is*, not what it *isn’t*. Well, that’s the job of volta – the ‘yet’ which appears here at the beginning of line seven. Sonnets are supposed to replicate a flexible, thinking mind. Here’s an idea I’ve had about love – and *yet* perhaps I’m wrong. Love is not a lifesaver, it’s not an essential, *and yet* many people are dying for love right as we speak! (That ‘even as I speak’ feels important in sonnets too, by the way, the sense of tension between evoking a very specific moment in thought and then drawing that out into something more long-lasting or profound).

What a volta usually does, in relation to the thought-arc of the whole sonnet, is kind of alchemical when done right – here’s a thought, here’s a thought that seems to contradict it, and – bang! – here’s a conclusion that appears are a result of the clash. “It may well be…” she says on line 9. So what’s the conclusion? Well – a definition of love, and she commits to it by bringing herself, or at least her lyric “I”-self into the poem. I’m willing to admit, she says, that some things are more important than love, like comfort and a full belly, and freedom from pain. I’m even willing to admit that, under duress, I might sell out my love for one or more of these things. Maybe. But “I do not think I would”. I love this final statement *so much*. The understatement of it. The power of it, when you realise what she’s concluding and discovering about love, and how she’s not totally rejecting but subtly questioning the earlier lines about how it’s not more important than life’s essentials. It’s beautiful, it makes my heart burst. Somebody should’ve shown this poem to Winston Smith at the end of Nineteen Eighty Four. I’ll take her message over Orwell’s any day.

Now here’s Things Sonnets Do #2: they are a vehicle for (and guide to) witty flirtation:

XXXI

Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!
Give back my book and take my kiss instead,
Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,
“What a big book for such a little head!”
Come, I will show you now my newest hat,
And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!
Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that,
I never again shall tell you what I think.
I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly;
You will not catch me reading any more;
I shall be called a wife to pattern by;
And some day when you knock, and push the door,
Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,
I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.

Another Shakespearean sonnet – same rhyme scheme, same four-part structure of three alternately rhymed quatrains followed by one couplet.

Usually sonnets that flirt tend to work because it’s like we’re overhearing an intimate (though obviously one-sided) moment between two lovers in a specific situation. I suppose, if the previous type of sonnet worked because defining the indefinable required mental dexterity, the breaking down of definitions and the ability to playfully contradict oneself, then this type works because flirtation requires that too.

I like how this one begins in media res – “Oh, oh, you will be sorry”. I think the ‘Oh, oh’ is really important because the power of this sonnet resides in how much we believe the mock-offence that the speaker has taken at her lover’s insult. Here Millay is again using those quatrain-based sections to allow us to overhear the argument – the subject of the sonnet will be sorry because he has made an offensive comment to the speaker, the detail of which we hear in line 4. Millay cleverly gets over the potential issue of one-sidedness by incredulously or mock-incredulously quoting the subject’s words back at him. So the subject (I’m going to make an interpretive choice and say ‘he’ here, even though Millay herself was bisexual, because of, well, the vibe). He’s dared to question her intelligence, which is probably the most devastating insult possible to the sort of person who writes sonnets for fun.

What’s his punishment for these words? We find this out in the next eight lines. She’s going to maliciously comply with his implication about her capacity for reading and thinking too much by putting on a show of hyper-femininity for the whole rest of their relationship – I love that word ‘prink’. That’s his punishment – she’ll still love him, “and all of that”, but she’s going to become the misogynistic cypher his joke implied she was, and he’s not going to get the benefit of her mind.

So where’s the volta? Last time it got in early at line 7 – but here she delays it. I’d argue she telegraphs it in line 11 with “And some day” – that ‘and’ is not a ‘but’ or a ‘yet’, but it might as well be. Then she delays it and turns the final line into a punchline. I love how, in fact, she delays it so much that line thirteen breaks the pentameter and ends up too long - I’m counting six beats there – heresy in a sonnet! But what a great rebuttal to his underestimation of her – rhyming with “not too stormy” with “whistle for me” is so clever and funny. I love how lightly all this is played too – she’s forgiving him, but there’s definitely a steely glint underneath the flirtation that is very 1920s New Woman. You’ve made the sexist joke, she’s saying, and I’m going to choose to take it as a joke because I love you ‘and all that’, but you’d better not do it again. Don’t forget Nora in ‘A Doll’s House’. Don’t mess with her.

Finally, Things Sonnets Do #3: they provide beautiful and devastating existential reflection on the fragility and transience of love, beauty, youth and life. Rossetti’s “Remember” is a great one, and it’s Keats’ calling card. Here’s Millay’s, but I’m going to do the nerd technical stuff first because at the end of it I just want to write about how good it is.

This one is different – it’s a Petrarchan sonnet. Sonnet-writing on a higher difficulty level. We’re still looking for iambic pentameter and the volta, but here we have a different rhyme scheme and therefore a different structure. The Italian sonnets (because of their more common rhyming words, remember), are structured in two parts – an octet that rhymes abba abba, and then a sestet that interleaves a pattern of cde rhymes.

XLII

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

I think from the first two sonnets we’ve learned that this type of poem is kind of powered by paradox. In the first, love was not worth everything, and was worth everything. In the second, the speaker was angry and not angry. Here that paradox is being used to much more poignant effect – the speaker’s memory of past love is absent, but the absence of that memory is a kind of presence - “…but the rain/Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh/Upon the glass and listen for reply” is such a beautiful, lyrical encapsulation of this.

Throughout the poem the speaker feels the absence of these past lovers as ‘a quiet pain’. I think there is a volta, too, but it’s more subtle than in the others – it doesn’t turn our heads entirely, but intensifies the bittersweet feelings in the first eight lines. I think it’s the ‘thus’ that occurs exactly where the rhyming structure of the Petrarchan sonnet tells us it should happen – on line 9. The speaker of the poem turns from being a lonely woman in a bed forgetting the details of her past lovers into a tree in winter that feels the absence in its branches of the birds ‘vanished one by one’. Like the woman in the first part, the tree is aware of a generalised pain caused by the loss, but cannot name or detail it.

That’s devastating! I can’t help of things like Alzheimer’s and dementia, and also of one of my favourite poems about loss, “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. It’s not comforting at all. Wouldn’t total oblivion be better than the generalised feeling of pain? I think what’s clever here is that even though it’s not comforting, the poem still does what sonnets do, what the first of these three did, which is to reaffirm the power of love. Here it’s maybe not a good thing, but it’s undeniable that love seems even to transcend the loss of everything else, even if it’s only as a generalised feeling of pain. Damn, I shouldn’t have finished on that one, should I?

In the comments:

Do you have a favourite sonnet?

Make the argument for Keats or someone else, I’ll probably cave