Edna St. Vincent Millay
 

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon --- his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet order, where, in pious rape jape
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.

Comment? At what point (if any) might one start to doubt her arguments? The start is brilliant; the last sentence is witty.

Line 8 has been corrected as needless.
Line 6 has been improved with an archaic word meaning to “joke” that is derived from a French verb originally meaning to “yap”.

Once, when I was a young fella, I stumbled upon a volume of Millay's Collected Sonnets. It was one of the most important things I ever stumbled upon in my haphazard poetry education. A life-changer, really.

David R.

Wrt your comment and question, I begin to take issue in lines 11-12. I've always remembered these lines from Auden's "Friday's Child", which seem to me a neat description of our human predicament:

Though instruments at Its command
Make wish and counterwish come true,
It clearly cannot understand
What It can clearly do.


Nevertheless, I also like the last line and the sonnet, which is true in its way.

M

Though it might upset partisans of a type of modernity, one of Petrarch’s best sonnets (64) describes how Petrarch has caged his beloved Laura in effect inside his heart, whence she cannot easily escape, though of course she lives in married bliss with another man. It’s worth reading in the original, and in a good translation such as the one by Robert M. Durling. Millay’s is a Petrarchian sonnet.

So an easy reading has it as a response to that sonnet and about some individual in Millay’s life. If so, her “rape” of him while inside her “cage” goes beyond Petrarch’s image of a trapped flower who should get used to things and not mope.

Another reading is that it is an exercise in writing about poetry. Grotesque, and maybe not fully satisfactory.

Another reading has Millay screaming from her own insides. and rhetorically (only) caging her pain with plausible baloney.

I too think the weakest lines are 11 and 12, unless they are a scornful description of a nincompoop lover. Does that make sense?

Plausible Baloney is winning by a nose as the jockeys near the finish line, which is good. Freeze frame! There’s still a chance to place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.

I actually love lines 11-12. It point strikes me as very existential, almost Nietzschean, especially when it ends on "good" with a small "g," as the upshot almost as an afterthought. I think the "screaming from the insides" theory is closest, though I think it is less "plausible baloney" than resignation to insignificance -- the unbearable lightness of being, to coin a phrase.

David R.

Plausible Baloney is ridden by female jockey whose jacket back says “I am not a nincompoop, but that weasel is!”

It is worth noting that Millay did some unconventional things with sonnets that push against the idea of being too wedded to order. In addition to her "Sonnets in Tetrameter" (perhaps not too unconventional, after all), she wrote a couple of sonnets with only thirteen lines. Interestingly both are on the subject of grief.

Her sister, Norma Millay, wrote about them in her introduction to the Collected Sonnets, pointing out that the Petrarchan rhyme scheme makes it clear which line is missing in each. The octave goes abba aba, so Norma says L7 is missing. Though I suppose it could be L6. Anyway, Norma says that in her opinion, her sister, "had no time for the one line that might hamper the driving movement in each of these tragic poems. And I like to think that perhaps she might not have been aware of dropping a line, that the force behind the sonnets was too pressing, too immediate, for her to adhere to the normal grace of fourteen lines."

Norma goes on to say that whether or not her sister knew she was dropping a line, these sonnets at least show that the poet "made no blueprint for her poems in progress," and "did not spend her inspired and productive hours counting lines, but instead let the nature and power of the subject matter determine variations in form."

If Norma's suppositions are accurate, it puts the lie to the whole "ordering chaos" business, or at least reinforces the irony of its pose.

David R.

From the back of the pack She’s A Freak’n Nut has suddenly surged and cut across on the inside close to the rail, pulling abreast of Plausible Baloney. Hooves are pounding. Freeze frame.

Allen and David,

Interesting reads on the poem. I don’t know the Petrarch sonnet, so that wasn’t my initial read. I read it as something of a cri de coeur or an existentialist poem, though with something of the performative of the poet mixed in.

My problem with lines 11-12 is ‘simple’, which to me can’t be other than a profession of faith, since IMO nothing in the empirical order proves things to be ‘simple’ -- I say this pace both Aquinas and Nietzsche. So the poem seems to me either ironic, or a desperate, voluntarist and not wholly convincing movement of faith. I read it more as the latter, but I admit I'm mostly unschooled in ESVM and her life.

Btw, writing this I thought of Robert Hass’s Praise, with that bewitching opening narrative:

We asked the captain what course
of action he proposed to take toward
a beast so large, terrifying, and
unpredictable. He hesitated to
answer, and then said judiciously:
“I think I shall praise it."

M

David, I apologize for not acknowledging your further background on Millay's writing just above. It is very good. Somehow at that moment the frequently dewy-eyed photos of Millay seemed too posed and I reacted hostilely. She was brilliant, and in her day perhaps they were her way of winning an audience. She could be attractive. Perhaps very manipulative. My first reading of this poem was that it was an exercise to fill paper in a period of writer's block, and not a bad one; good enough to publish, even if grotesque or not fully executed. Then I came to feel it was a story of fury and despair with the stresses of monogamy. But simple erotic frustrations, if present, could be too simple. People are more than monkeys, even men. There are men who can't stand being shoe-horned by surprise into things they really don't want, ever. One needn't be a rebel to say NO. Which might not align with anything else. "Swing and sway with strong-minded Millay"? Chaos! And she "will" "'make' 'him' 'good'"? Where is his hope?

In the last freeze frame, a horse called In Your Dreams and another called Petrarch are doing quite well also. The pack leaders are so bunched they could all collide.

More seriously, I think there's Petrarch in this sonnet.

Personally, I can't see this as a roman de clé, with Chaos corresponding to a real-world, flesh-and-blood beloved. I see it far more abstractly.

I see Chaos as the general topic of love, about which many, if not most, poets write in an attempt to gain some sort of intellectual control of it.

Of course that effort to impose a sonnet's order on passion can never be completely successful--as illustrated by the fact that this poem, which began with the poet's bold claim that she would put Chaos into fourteen orderly lines, is only thirteen lines long.

And the poet's failure to do what she had set out to do structurally underscores her failure to do what she had set out to do thematically, too. Even if lovers could, by means of poems, force their beloveds to become something they aren't--in this case, forcing Chaos to become good and obedient and biddable, against his will--then love itself would cease to be what it really is, and would instead become a form of violence against their beloveds' true selves.

[Edited to say: In the next point, Allen made a joke while pointing out the fact that I miscounted. Then, being a kind soul, worried that he'd offended me by doing so, and edited his comment in Post #12. For the record, I appreciated the correction, and was amused by the way in which Allen delivered it. No worries, friend.]

Julie, I think there might be a problem with David's reference to Norma's introduction in post #7 because it implies that this poem has only 13 lines, whereas it actually has 14. Your comment is, as usual, very perceptive.

If she had left it at 13 lines, her Chaos would have fallen through the hole in the bottom of the sea and escaped. Any cut line should be end-stopped, yet not leave another line without a rhyme. I'd vote to cut line 8: "Till he with Order mingles and combines.", and I'd put a period at the end of "I hold his essence and amorphous shape [.]"

mmm

Line 8 has been corrected per Eratosphere standards as unneeded.

LOL, happy to oblige, Allen.

I don't think this poem is about love, but about creation. Like God, Millay sees herself as taking chaos and making a world out of it, though her world is sonnet-sized. The poem is full of allusions galore, from the ability of chaos to take any form (like Proteus) to the pious rape (Donne, "Batter My Heart") of forcing chaos to serve order. She does not claim to be able to understand chaos (as God would), but once she has made chaos serve order, she (like God) declares her creation "good." I also think that she is referring to human experience as feeling chaotic. Writing about it does not make the experience itself less chaotic, but it gives the writer a feeling of control that is satisfying. When experience controls you, the servitude is awful. When you control it (even without fully understanding it), it is rather like harnessing the power of the unconscious. No one understands their own unconscious, and yet it does seem to have its own rules: hence, the feeling that there is something simple behind what appears to be incomprehensible. Does anyone fully understand poetic creation? The ideas come from somewhere, and anyone who writes has to deal with the feeling that part of the activity is out of one's control.

Susan

Susan, that's a very well thought out comment, with a lot more in it than my early "an exercise in writing about poetry." I especially like what you say here:

"Writing about [chaotic human experience] does not make the experience itself less chaotic, but it gives the writer a feeling of control that is satisfying. When experience controls you, the servitude is awful. When you control it (even without fully understanding it), it is rather like harnessing the power of the unconscious."

That feeling of control can begin by just labeling the experience, calling it names. At its worst, this can be tracing a path from innocent-seeming incident A to consequence B followed by possibly premature act C through disaster D, etc., all lined up like dominoes. The roads not taken, or taken. At its best, it can go the other way too. Our biological history ensures that we can usually remember the negative paths most easily so we can try not to repeat similar screw-ups and avoid other traps. Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 ("When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes....") calls the names at least, even if his problems can't be remedied. Millay wants to "make" him. I bet she did!

I like your remarks about poetic creation as sometimes being a strategy to put reins on chaos.

Very perceptive. Thanks!

I think Susan's analysis is generally on point, but with one huge caveat -- I think it is all ironic. I think Millay thinks there is really no difference between "Order" and "Chaos" (both capitalized as though equivalent epithets of the same thing) and ultimately that they aren't really things at all.

I think the uncapitalized "good," which is almost a consolation prize is opposed to an idealized "Good." Creating -- making art, making poems -- is what makes things "good" and the whole "Order" vs "Chaos" business is a sort of self-deceiving (or self-aggrandizing) ruse.

The last 3-4 lines taper down from a grand schema -- backs off from a deep analysis -- to simple, almost resigned, formulation of making things "good" without caring to understand more about what that means or how it works. The making "good" of it (whatever "it" may be) is, essentially the only way to make it understood.

David R.

David, I wasn't addressing the tone in my remarks. I agree with you that the tone is ironic. Millay has an in-your-face kind of flippancy that allows her to get away with tackling big issues in an insouciant way. I think she likes the wiggle room of not being easy to pin down on anything, but I also think that order and chaos are meaningful terms and that they are not interchangeable in her argument.

Susan

Yes, great analysis, Susan. Btw, I also heard Donne's "Batter My Heart" when I first read it.

M

Donne’s poem (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...ee-persond-god) seems like the reverse of Millay’s, though the line about betrothal to the three-personed god’s enemy has it’s own interest if taken as more than a rhetorical device to allow a similarly hostile audience member to enter this poem of Donne’s: Donne performing as advocatus diaboli. But whether Donne experienced a crisis of his religious faith or not, and whether he was “espoused” to such an enemy are not what this thread is about. I would like to now be done with Donne!

Insouciance, flippancy, wiggle room: these are productive concepts I think. Now, “pious rape”, what for kind of rape is that? Is it legal? Or is it only eye and ear bait meaning not much except the flashing lights outside Steepletop, her residence? I confess that I haven’t yet tried to discover when Millay wrote this. I say “pious rape” is rhyme driven, pure and simple.

[Never mind. I shouldn't think with my mouth open. I'm still changing my mind about the importance of a male rape metaphor in what is basically a Poem about Poetry, not a poem about sexual dynamics.]

Julie, and other interested parties, it’s quite late here on the east coast in the City of Sin and I’m not up to speed on Augustine, so my response will be brief. If this is not about some individual in particular, but it is nonetheless an aspirational rape, then it is rape broadside, like an ancient ship of the line with 74 guns starboard and port. Which is appropriate when Pirate Chaos is a target free to skim downwind, wheel around and rape back. Yet she holds her Chaos close, up close and personal. I didn’t say that this wasn’t rape, I just proposed that the rhyme with “ape” was too delicious to miss, and the dominatrix wants to gussy it up with piety: You Will Enjoy This, Whether You Like It Or Not! That’s some people’s idea of a real good time, I betcha. Well? For me in this poem it was First the “ape”—Then the “rape”. I’m not sure my reply fully addressed what you said or that it makes sense, but it seems like you are suggesting that Millay wants to eat her cake and have it later, so to speak. A rape of protean Chaos...seems chaotic, no? Hard to get a hold of. Anyway, my feet are now going to go pitter-pat down the path to the portal of pillow pictures, and pass up prolonging problematic partisanship on this particular, potentially pious, poetic porn possibility.

It is very offensive to use a word that describes offering sexual violence to anyone, even an abstract philosophical concept. “Hope” is an imperfect rhyme that Millay would not accept, so her hurtful word has been edited to “jape”.

Just peeking in to say that I love the unusual "Sonnets From an Ungrafted Tree" as well.

Hullo, Gail. It’s quite nice to have you aboard. You got me to page through my Millay books again, and there’s just a lot that comes to mind. I could make some suggestions myself, like “Recuerdo” vs. “I, being a woman and distressed” or “Love is not blind. I see with single eye”. And the mathematician’s favorite, if not that of the historian of math, the almost perfect “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare”. I fancy I understand that personally better than most. She could be remarkably yet realistically cold. And yet.

Julie, forgive yourself. (Good) angels rush about where fools like me gently scratch their heads.

Re: Donne: Eppur lo sento.

The question is how, by what agency, the poet’s world takes order. In Donne, it is the triune God. In ESVM, it is creativity, the poet’s own. Both poets speak about making sense of unruly experience, in a sonnet, and both invoke the language of rape. So for me, the comparison is inescapable. IMO it’s noteworthy that creativity assumes an almost divine importance for ESVM, as it does for other ‘secular’ poets (e.g., Rilke and Stevens). Or Keats to Shelley: 'My Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk.' For Donne, in orthodoxy, it’s an aspect of the divine.

Ach, Du lieber Augustine! Pious rape again. (Does anyone not outside of the standard Western cum Orthodox versions of Christianity allow a pious jape?)* I still have 99% of Julie’s recently retracted post in an Eratospere notification where she sees the sense of “rape” as an abduction rather than a physical violation. Plenty of corrrelates for that around the world. First the abduction, then comes the moral marriage. It’s found today, I’m told personally second or third hand, in high caste India, and used to occur in Mexico. That hardly fits Millay’s puzzle, though, so I’m sticking with my tweak to “jape”. YET, my mind has now stooped from its birdnest to this altered thought: Millay wanted to get “rape” (of a man by a woman) into a poem, and contrived then to rhyme it with “shape” and “ape”. These latter words being the rhyme-driven items. As I am not an ape except when I want to act like one,** I reject her implied slur on masculine chaos. There is civilized chaos too. It’s called sprezzatura. As for rape in the sexual sense for a religious experience, that’s not my thingo.

*Footnote: I can’t see this as a religious poem at all. There are plenty of markers in other poems by Millay that explicitly suggest a wide and deep hostility to anything not Greco-Roman pagan. If really sympathic poems exist, my skimpy reading has missed them.

**Footnote: One could think of this purported quote from Theodore Roosevelt in a more innocent age: “Speak softly and carry a big stick. Unless you can ride a dinosaur. Then do that instead.” — Found on a Fathers Day card made by Recycled Paper Greetings (c). It shows Teddy R in top hat and glasses, holding its reins and astride a gaping haltered Tyrannosaurus Rex. — I dunno! Don’t ride the saurians, me.
PPS: that is not an accurate quote from Teddy Roosevelt. But it’s a charming card.

For those who want think about riding a dinosaur, here’s a link to a chronoplastic (frequently changing) Dinosaur Comics on the Internet. Sometimes I look at it. http://www.qwantz.com/index.php

I am amused and blush at your moniker...

I don’t say the poem is religious in a conventional sense; I say ESVM puts the poet’s creativity in the place of Donne’s divine. I also say that the poem is 'voluntary', meaning it asserts an act of will, in the hope (faith?) that it will order her world.

As for pious rape in religion, here is something of an account. Also, this woman’s memoirs recount instances where she was taken against her will.

I think my friend Julie sometimes underprizes herself.

And of course I may be wrong. I'm usually wrong about 6 things before breakfast...

M

This thread is veering close to discussions of Millay’s motivations rather than her craft. So it might ok to briefly think about “awful servitude” in the light of her possible attitude toward her father, who apparently was ejected from her childhood family when she was nine or ten years old. The prologue to that must have been traumatic and left her with immense ambivalence toward him and males generally. Maybe “I love him and hate him” plays a role here. Intact nuclear families may not always be possible, despite their huge advantages, other things being equal. But that is only armchair shrink wrapping. She might be just as well be cursing a life full of Chaos. I prefer that approach and applaud her choice of words.

Soon this thread will exhaust itself. Or not.

Allen, I think this forum is certainly wide open for discussions of what any poet means in any particular poem, but I am made uncomfortable by anyone "correcting" a poet's poem, for any reason--even as a joke, unless it is clearly just a joke and not really intended as a criticism--and it looks worse when a man does it to a woman's poem. It is rather like "mansplaining," and it certainly sounds like a putdown of Millay, as do many of your comments about her and about the poem. Can we agree that not everyone has to like every poem or every poet without being insulting to the poet (even the dead ones who cannot take offense)?

Susan

Susan, I don't subscribe to a gender-based taboo on critiques.

Allen, I am not proposing a taboo on critique. The strike-throughs, though, seem to be going a bit far in a forum called "Musing on Mastery." Would you be as likely to rewrite one of Robert Frost's poems for him? Would you do it in the same way? We can all debate what his poems mean, too, but we don't generally rewrite them.

Susan

Susan, you must believe me when I say I certainly would. And also the sometime genius Conrad Aiken. Or Archibald MacLeish. Or Bob Dylan, or so help me, William Butler Yeats or W. H. Auden. Or myself, in retrospect.

Best, Allen

Okay, Allen, I can see that trying to rewrite great poems is something you are interested in and that you have solicited changes for poems by Auden and Yeats. It is not to my taste, but I can't speak for others. You did not do any actual strike-throughs on the poems by Auden and Yeats, so when you did on the one by Millay, it stood out as being different. Women are historically more likely to have people rewrite their poems for them (e.g., Dickinson), and I tend to notice when it happens. I disapprove. I also notice that female writers are often not given as much credit for rational thought and argument in their poems as male writers are given. When a reviewer commented that A. E. Stallings's poems had no "philosophy," I was incredulous. He could not see that her philosophy is embedded in the poems, which is, of course, what poets do. Millay does not have to be a religious believer to be able to comment on Biblical themes and motifs and poems by other religious poets, such as Donne.

Tastes in poetry are personal, so there is no right or wrong about what people like. But people don't always see how their comments look to others unless the others tell them. I'm just one reader. Other people will disagree. But honest information about responses is always useful if people are ever going to understand one another better.

Susan

Susan, this all takes me back to when I taught college level literature. I have made certain changes to the threads you mention so that they might resemble chalk board session photos from a class. The simple reason that I didn’t do those as-if classroom discussion revisions of the great (Auden and Yeats) then when the threads were first posted, is that I was, shall we say, chickenshit. I definitely include Vincent Millay among the greats. Your point about Dickinson and others is inarguable. On one of those threads someone said approximately that We have to take the weak parts with the best parts with author so-and-so. That’s not necessarily so. Editors and critics have been cherry picking quotes from poets ever since “On the Sublime” by Pseudo-Longinus 2,000 years ago, and that guy (or woman?), Pseudo-Longinus, saved a great fragment by Sappho that we would not have otherwise.

Allen, I too think that there are weak parts in many of Millay's poems, and that the same is true for most great writers. However, it isn't really possible to "correct" poems that are never going to change, and not everyone would agree on what needs correcting anyway. So I agree with the idea that we have to accept writers (and their poems) as they are and not as we wish they were. Both the weaknesses and the strengths are part of who they are. Sometimes their weaknesses (psychologically or in terms of the choices they make) are tied to their strengths in ways that we can't fully know. That's why I prefer the question "What is the writer saying?" to "What is wrong with what the writer is saying and how she is saying it?" Neither question has a definitive answer, but I get further with the former one.

Susan

Susan, we can agree. Both questions are important. Both are, to me, essential.

Allen

I would rewrite one line of Frost's: "When I see birches bent to left or right." With Millay's poem, I find the first line nothing if not ironic and a clear statement that the poem is a sonnet about the sonnet. Millay's biography shows that she dealt with (and sometime dealt out) a lot of personal chaos. My continual problem with her is that her emotional content often seems at odds with the tradition of the sonnet and its past language. A lot of her charm, though, is how she can be so thoroughly modern Millay while trying to work things into a form bound with whalebone stays. She often succeeds.

In haste, I want to call renewed attention to my change of heart on the rhyme words and my presumptuous “edit” in post # 27. If I’m right, her poem was a bold statement of a possible type of adult feminine lust that she sought to redeem by calling it “pious” and framing it as a literary trope. Bold indeed. If I’m right. But it seems to have been a literary “lust in the heart” — and not visibly acted on. A type of extreme “sovranty”, and, as someone says, what man would refuse when a woman woos? Well, Joseph in the Biblical story in Egypt did, they say. Which brings up the matter of power relationships in intimate personal relationships. Even so, I’m going to retain “jape,” and let this thread slide down, if everyone else will.

"Ravish" (Donne) and "rape" (Millay) were synonyms at one time, but the latter is heavily freighted in contemporary speech. See St. Teresa of Avila.