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.
|