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.
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