[Allen Tice]

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”.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Michael F]

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

[Allen Tice]

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.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Allen Tice]

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

[Allen Tice]

Line 8 has been corrected per Eratosphere standards as unneeded.

[Julie Steiner]

LOL, happy to oblige, Allen.

[Susan McLean]

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

[Allen Tice]

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!