Edna St. Vincent Millay's gendered language and form: "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree."

Style, Spring, 1995 by Irene R. Fairley

Sonnets in this sequence tend to be rather fluid. Millay uses the English rhyme scheme throughout but largely rejects the formal divisions. Only two of the sonnets have distinct quatrains and couplets corresponding to syntactic units: "Not over-kind nor over-quick in study" (9) and "There was upon the sill a pencil mark" (15). Millay signals irony through formal structure, in sonnet 9 describing a classmate's gesture with high rhetoric and in 15 conveying the moment of his subsequent death with an image of a broken clock. The rest of the sonnets have a freer structure, more characteristic of Millay's adaptation of the English form. In general, her sonnets move rapidly because of enjambed lines, and end-stopped quatrain divisions tend to be avoided. Two of the sonnets in the sequence show a combined structure. English in rhyme scheme, both sonnet 10, "She had forgotten how the August night," and sonnet 12, "Tenderly, in those times, as though she fed," divide into octave and sestet with weak couplet closings. Yet even when the couplet may function in the traditional fashion, as a summary statement, or in causal relationship to the preceding twelve lines, Millay shows a tendency to integrate it syntactically rather than to separate it.

The couplet is also affected by an obvious feature of the sequence: the lengthened final line she gives all seventeen sonnets. Even critics who had praise for the sequence noticed this feature, calling them "false sonnets" (Harold Lewis Cook 29) and predicting that this lengthened line would be the target of "darts of criticism" (Madeleva 156). Millay defended her practice in a letter dated 1917 (no. 50): "I know very well the sonnets of the incomplete sequence are not perfect sonnets, -- I made the fourteenth line an alexandrine purposely, -- somehow they had to be ended that way." As completed they are not alexandrines, or at least not pure ones of six feet and twelve syllables. Final lines most often have seven feet (with some qualifying as loose alexandrines if one allows for elision) but others have fifteen and even sixteen syllables.

Millay intuitively felt the need for extra emphasis. Since new information tends to occur in sentence final position (end-focus) and coincide with greatest sentence stress, a lengthened line provides an emphatic closure. Sometimes the lengthened line may be used for other effects. For instance, it may serve to stretch out a point as it does in sonnet 2, where repetition imitates the monotony of the rain drumming on the roof. In sonnet 9, the long stretching out that starts at line 13 underscores the banality of the girl's conclusion, "But what's the odds? -- It's pretty nice to know / You've got a friend to keep you company everywhere you go." A trailing cadence also works to suggest the girl's spoken voice, as it does to suggest the woman's voice in sonnet 16: "I don't know what you do exactly when a person dies." The long final line may serve to delay or draw out closure as in sonnet 14: "She had kept that kettle boiling all night long, for company." Or the extra beats of the final line may suggest the woman's slow process of coming to awareness: "That things in death were neither clocks nor people, but only dead" (15); "Small, and absurd, and hers: for once, not hers, unclassified" (17). In discussion below, we shall also see how importantly these long final lines figure in the group of reflective sonnets.