public Free Lover is ultimately saved by her middle-class "American" aesthetic
sensibility, the poem is unsparing in its depiction of the dangers she perceives herself
as negotiating. For the bohemian speaker / the women of MacDougal Street raise the specter
that taking to the streets-parading her desire, writing Free Love poetry, being the very
national icon of Free Love—will reduce her to the level of "pink nets and wet
shells trodden under heel."
The Woman Lover in Nature
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
Millay,
"God’s World"
The management of Free Love, emblematic and otherwise, spills over into Millay’s nature
poetry, which has as important a place in her larger New Womanly strategy as the poetry of
explicitly interpersonal content. While the love poems themselves focus predominantly on
the outward shape of love, the nature poems enact various of its psychosexual dimensions.
Millay’s many love poems trace themes of sexual desire, ephemeral passion, and amorous
adventure for its own sake. They issue from a voice which is sometimes suffering,
sometimes haughty and heartless—yet, as critics from Edmund Wilson to contemporary
feminist Jan Montefiore have pointed out, Millay’s lover voice was nearly always
suggestive of a perfectly integrated, self-possessed speaker. Even those poems that
thematized despair and loss imparted the sense of love and its sorrows as a personal
experience for the woman speaker, an enhancement of her individuality, rather than an
event generated out of her interaction with a significant Other. The speaker’s identity
was that of a lover—more in spite of than because of the presence of a loved one.
Montefiore makes this point, citing Wilson’s remark that "when [Millay] came to write
about her lovers, she gave them so little individuality that it was usually, in any given
case, impossible to tell which man she was writing about" (apparently a sore point).
Yet as the embodiment of Free Love and New Womanhood, Millay was bound to display not
only sexual tough-mindedness but also psychological characteristics conventionally
considered essential to femininity. The culturally new possibility of an actively desiring
woman did not necessarily imply a radical conceptual revision of female sexuality as a
whole. In fact, as we shall see in chapter 2, the scientific discovery of women as sexual
beings was often presented alongside the discovery of a biological foundation for female
passivity or for early marriage. A woman might be a sexual adventurer, but her
"nature" demanded that she experience intimacy as submersion in a powerful male
Other. The contradictions of this modern sexuality intersect in complex and even widely
divergent ways with Millay’s other central imperative as a woman writer, that of attaining
literary authority.
Millay’s nature poetry frequently stages the threatened loss of self conventionally
associated with the "woman in love." In the interest of achieving a tenable
persona as Free Lover and New Woman, Millay superficially divorces the ideals which in
general she and bohemian ideology strive to equate: love may be good or bad but it
is an experience that reinforces individual identity; beauty, however, as it
appears in Nature, is the intersubjective "Other" that threatens the self. And
yet, even this threat is a nominal one. Working within the Romantic tradition of
transcendence and the sublime, Millay transforms a classically feminine psychological
posture of self-abnegation into an achievement of literary authority.
"Assault" (1921) is a nature poem with an especially sexualized—or, more
accurately, gendered—framework. The speaker depicts herself as a vulnerable woman in
a desolate place in fear of being "raped" by Beauty.
I
I had forgotten how the frogs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not so have ventured forth alone
At dusk upon this unfrequented road.
II
I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!
What is remarkable about this poem is the contrast between the concreteness of the
woman, her situation, and her sense of imperilment, on the one hand, and the abstractness
of the threat itself as Beauty on the other. Of course, this threat is only sometimes
abstract: in its alternate incarnation it is strikingly mundane and specific. While an
aesthetic response to the croaking of frogs is arguably well within the bounds of poetic
convention, the sense of acute physical imperilment expressed by the speaker seems
jarringly disproportionate. But it would seem that this impression is rendered
intentionally. To the extent that her responses diverge from the expected, the speaker has
demonstrated the singular acuteness of her sensibility—and the singular personal risk
to which it subjects her. The specifically womanly fear she experiences in passing through
"savage Beauty" on her way from "one house to another" testifies
simultaneously to her artistry and her femininity—with the remarkable outcome that
artistry and femininity come to seem mutually interdependent.
Millay was also able to imagine this conjunction in less overtly ambivalent terms. In
fact, certain of her formulations suggest a utopian synthesis of sexuality and poetic
vision. In "Journey," nature provides a framework for what emerges as the
unconventional psychosexual dynamics of Free Love. From the same volume as
"Assault," " Journey" is a study in threatened dissolution and
reintegration. In the first lines, the speaker travels down a road, symbolic of her life,
and yearns to enter the natural idyll to either side of her.
Ah, could I lay me down in this long grass
And close my eyes, and let the quiet wind
Blow over me,—I am so tired, so tired
Of passing pleasant places! All my life,
Following Care along the dusty road,
Have I looked back at loveliness and sighed;
Yet at my hand an unrelenting hand
Tugged ever, and I passed. All my life long
Over my shoulder have I looked at peace;
And now I fain would lie in this long grass
And close my eyes.
In this passage, the "quiet wind," the "loveliness," and
"peace" promise a relief from "Care," which is suggestive of death.
The "unrelenting hand" of human obligation has "tugged ever" at the
human drive—the "hand"—of the speaker, keeping her from her desire. At
this point in the poem, the implied opposition is drawn fairly simply between dogged
forward motion and its absence in tranquility. The shape of the landscape changes in the
subsequent passage, when the speaker has moved "Yet onward!" What had been
merely soothing becomes particularized, provocative, and alluring.
Cat-birds call
Through the long afternoon, and creeks at dusk
Are guttural. Whip-poor-wills wake and cry,
Drawing the twilight close about their throats.
Only my heart makes answer. Eager vines
Go up the rocks and wait; flushed apple-trees
Pause in their dance and break the ring for me;
Dim, shady wood-roads, redolent of fern
And bayberry , that through sweet bevies thread
Of round-faced roses, pink and petulant,
Look back and beckon ere they disappear.
Here, nature has lost its former blandness, taking on color and sensual definition.
Still bound to the road, the speaker now experiences the lure of the roadside as a direct
erotic appeal—as, in fact, multiple erotic appeals. In the short space between
the nature of death and the nature of sex, the dynamics of the scene have evolved
considerably: the speaker’s strong desire has evoked a like response in the passive
landscape. In the process of becoming mutual, this exchange has likewise become erotic and
dispersed, emanating from formerly hidden sites, which come into focus only in the act of
desirous expression.
Still the speaker sticks to the road ("Only my heart, only my heart
responds"): she knows the consequence of straying from this discrete and driven
existence is the final "peace" of dissolution into nature. Yet by the
conclusion, the basic opposition that has structured the poem throughout has broken down;
the final lines assume no tension between road and roadside.
.
. . blue hill, still silver lake,
Broad field, brightflower, —and the long white road.
A gateless garden, and an open path:
My feet to follow, and my heart to hold.
Moreover, the character of the nature described has shifted for a third time. Not the
balm of grass in the wind or the eroticism of "flushed apple-trees," the
elements of this final landscape have the schematic quality of myth—of a literary landscape.
What appears at first to be the speaker’s reconciliation to a life divided between desire
and duty emerges finally as erotic-aesthetic mastery.
Yet, ah, my path is sweet on either side
All through the dragging day,—sharp underfoot,
And hot, and like dead mist the dry dust hangs—
But far, oh, far as passionate eye can reach,
And long, ah, long as rapturous eye can cling,
The world is mine: blue hill, still silver lake,
Broad field, bright flower, and the long white road.
[emphasis added]
The speaker realizes a utopian vision of unrestrained and free-playing desire through
her "rapturous," "passionate," "reach[ing],"
"cling[ing]" "eye." Far from annihilating her, this sexuality gains
her poetic control over the object of her desire, "the world."
By way of negotiating the problematic sexuality of the Free Lover, "Journey"
achieves the ultimate bohemian ideal: the fusion of love and art. But whereas the literary
authority of "Assault" depends directly on female vulnerability, the achievement
of mastery depicted in "Journey" is at a distinct remove from conventional
femininity. In fact, it resonates at key points with male transcendentalism: not only is
the mastering "eye" itself strongly reminiscent of Emerson but also the
"road" with which the speaker is all along associated puts her squarely in the
tradition of Whitman. Moreover, in the most directly sexualized passage of the poem,
femininity would seem to be deflected away from the speaker and onto nature, with its
"wait[ing]" vines, "pink and petulant" roses, and coyly
"beckon[ing]" wood-roads. Yet their invitation to her is not to dominate them as
a masculine Other but to join them as the kindred being she is: the "apple-trees /
pause in their dance and break the ring for me." As we have seen, she declines to
join them in fear for her life as a discrete being. But that is not to say that her
survival requires a steady forward progress on "the open road." To the contrary,
in the crucial last lines, the road is subsumed in the larger artistic landscape, a scene
which is itself testimony to the speaker’s aesthetic mastery. Moreover, the
"eye" from which this mastery emanates represents not masculine transcendence
but female "passion" and "rapture" as the very essence of poetic
sensibility.
"Journey" suggests that Millay’s professional economy depended on the
convergence of these seemingly opposed terms. Whereas high-modernist contemporaries like
Marianne Moore and H. D. found the possibility of self-protection and even transcendence
of gender in a formalist aesthetics, Millay used traditional verse to turn her
(inescapable) female sexuality to artistic authority.
Despite the ultimate synthesis that "Journey" achieves, the equation of
mastery with masculinity has a strong pull for Millay, and in certain other works it finds
clear expression. Most striking are those instances in which her speaker achieves
aesthetic-erotic mastery by dominating an expressly feminized addressee. There are traces
of this tendency in the "pink and petulant" roses of "Journey," but a
starker example is Millay’s poem to her youngest sister, Kathleen Millay, a woman who
aspired to be a writer herself and, we can only guess, lived in acute consciousness of
Edna’s stellar example :
Still must the poet as of old,
In barren attic bleak and cold,
Starve, freeze, and fashion verses to
Such things as flowers and song and you;
Still as of old his being give
In Beauty’s name, while she may live,
Beauty that may not die as long
As there are flowers and you and song.
"To Kathleen" implicitly counts its writer among the (male) "poets of
old" while unambiguously declaring the ostensible object of its praise insentient
(female) "Beauty." Millay has accorded herself a consciously classic, even
cliche—and certainly bohemian—artistic posture, expressly at the expense of
"Kathleen’s" own claims to creative authority. By the same mechanism, she has
aggressively defended her own iconic identity as the bohemian Muse against the taint of
feminine objectification. Indeed, we may see this poetic exercise as an escalation of the
protective persona of "Vincent," under (short-lived) cover of which Millay made
her first splash in the Village as the poet of "Renascence." While she went on
signing her family correspondence this way (playing the boy to her mother and sisters),
fame as a New Woman so fixed her public femininity as perhaps to necessitate-or, at least,
invite—a gesture like "To Kathleen."
Millay’s negotiations of her singular subcultural status only rarely took such dubious
form, but to the extent that Millay is an extreme case, she serves to highlight the thorny
immediacy of a masculinist subcultural context for the production of a woman’s poetry. By
the same token, she suggests the resourcefulness with which a woman’s poetry may
manipulate the possibilities and imperatives of her subcultural milieu.
Indeed, the same milieu may produce vastly different poetic strategies in two women
writers, as is evident in the comparison between Millay and Genevieve Taggard, the subject
of the next two chapters. Obviously, Millay and Taggard were women with different personal
histories and imperatives, but just as important was the structural difference of their
respective positions within bohemia. Millay’s almost literal equation with the symbolic
life of the Village locked her in to a tight set of possibilities, as well as a
significant investment in her own image. Taggard, by contrast, entered bohemia with the
low profile of the feminine rank and file, which freed her to push at the contradictions
of bohemian ideology as well to give herself over fully to its values. Less implicated in
iconic bohemia, she had proportionately less to lose in testing the limits of its
consciousness. Immediately evident to the reader will be the stark difference of her tone:
where Millay has a certain (necessary) "lightness" we might associate with the
thrust and parry of self-preservation, Taggard throws all of her considerable rhetorical
force behind a bracing radicalism. If Millay is the Muse of bohemia, Taggard is its
conscience.
From Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York’s Literary Women.
Copyright ? 1998 by Oxford UP. Excerpted from a longer essay: see the original book for
the full discussion.