After She Left
This sonnet is reminiscent of Millay’s great Sonnet 02 (“Time does not bring relief; you all have lied”), athough in “After She Left” no one is blamed for lying about the length of the mourning process or the extent and effects of human suffering.
In image after image, each listed in the purposely deadend-stopped lines of the octet (albeit stopped with commas), the depth of the man’s grief is unmistakably portrayed. Admittedly, some of the rhymes in the octet are conventional, yet I like the blend of masculine and feminine rhymes, and think that this mélange plays an integral role in the desired tone.
Lines 9-12, where the mental deterioration is likened to falling leaves, form a stark and hauntingly accurate yet eloquent description of a deepening depression, culminating in the death wish. The passage brought to mind Dickinson’s:
This is the Hour of Lead —
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —
First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —
except that here there is not even a “quartz contentment.” The use of the word “gravity” in L12 is a shrewd and subtle choice. There are at least three levels of meaning in that word alone, as it applies to this passage.
As the sonnet is written in the third person, the reader is left to wonder whether “he” has now recovered and is perhaps retelling the event more objectively, or whether, in fact, an executor and a parson were needed, in the end.
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