The woman as political poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay and the mid-century canon

Criticism, Spring, 1995 by John Timberman Newcomb

The first of these texts, "The Anguish," acted as a foreboding prelude to the more direct and wrenching articulations of specific political situations in "Justice Denied" and "Hangman's Oak," which followed immediately. "The Anguish" expressed Millay's ambivalence at the new knowledge of self and world she had not asked for, but could not deny: though she "would to God" she could return to the "beauty" which had nourished her youth, "the anguish of the world is on [her] tongue," rendering her unable to swallow the easier nourishments of her earlier poetry. As well as the imagery of the holy eucharist, Millay was drawing upon the old Welsh custom of the sin-eater, an itinerant outcast who was fed a large meal over the bier of a dead person; the food represented the deceased's sins, which as they were consumed were removed from his or her soul. But what of the soul of the sin-eater? Though she accepted it, she did not relish this role of scapegoat; this speaker admitted that "there is more than I can eat," asking implicitly why her audience did not join her in trying to reduce the amount in her "bowl" - a figure of both earth and book. The final two lines extended this portrayal of the poet ask a leader of a group of mature adults who, being the only ones not "toothless," must take the sober responsibility for digesting this anguish since they, and only they, could "rend this meat."

"Wine from These Grapes," following "Justice Denied" and "Hangman's Oak," framed those two poems with further exploration of the imagery of the eucharist begun in "The Anguish" (and extended in "Hangman's Oak" through the links between the body of the lynching victim and the crucified Christ). Here the poet's irresistibly growing need to speak of social injustice was figured through a revision of the conventional portrayal of the eucharist as a miraculous transubstantiation of the blood of Christ into communion wine. Here, in contrast, the wine was created not by magic or prayer but by exhausting human labor:

If you would speak with me on any matter, At any time, come where these grapes are grown; And you will find me treading them to must. Lean then above me sagely, lest I spatter Drops of the wine I tread from grapes and dust.

Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die. Three women come to wash me clean Shall not erase this stain. Nor leave me lying purely, Awaiting the black lover. Death, fumbling to uncover My body in his bed, Shall know There has been one Before him.

Millay figured her persona as a wine-presser charged with treading a wine of knowledge which, through the play on the word must (the juice, pulp, and skin of the crushed grapes before fermentation), became a pure, if bitter, distillation of the necessity for action according to moral principle. In an increasingly characteristic critique of the personal lyric genre in which she had made her reputation, Millay then turned from a personal beginning to address her readers directly on the subject of public debate. If they should seek to discuss any subject with her, she warned, they should stay well above "lest I spatter"; the poet's sense of outrage was thus seen as potentially communicable to the readers whom she invited into intellectual or emotional dialogue with her. Even her death and the cleansing ministrations of attending females would not eradicate these stains of knowledge. In the poem's final lines, Death itself was diminished into a "fumbling" cuckold by the force of her outrage, suggesting that her awareness of social injustice had been equal in impact to a sexual deflowering. The poet thus demanded that her audience see her as no frivolous cause-monger, but as someone wrenching the most private of personal responses into public acknowledgement. The character of these grapes made for a painfully bitter wine, yet Millay accepted that as her political eucharist; the more bitter the drink, the stronger the drinker able to make it her nourishment.