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

Style, Spring, 1995 by Irene R. Fairley

The psychological drama of the "Ungrafted Tree" is conveyed mainly through this variant form: sonnets of suspended sentences that reveal the consciousness of the woman. With their freer structuring, they bring us close to her inner voice. They are interesting, too, for their linking of gendered language and subject with form: the reflective condition is provoked or triggered by something external, such as a mundane chore, gathering the wood or laundry, or cleaning the kitchen.(8) The household matters that fill the woman's mind become the vehicle of her understanding.

Five Sonnets Among Seventeen

The group of sonnets I will focus on consists of "The last white sawdust on the floor was grown" (2), "She filled her arms with wood, and set her chin" (3), "One way there was of muting in the mind" (7), "It came into her mind, seeing how the snow" (11), and "From the wan dream that was her waking day" (13). Certainly other sonnets in the sequence have a reflective content, but they also have a more conscious thought process with awareness signaled by definite pauses, questions, and pondered responses. A closer look at the group I identify as reflective sonnets will reveal how the sequence builds to a climax. This is precisely the point that critics have missed, tending to see the sequence as unrelentlessly bleak or static. By examining this group of five sonnets, we may arrive at a different reading.

As the sequence opens, "So she came back into his house again / And watched beside his bed until he died," Millay introduces the wife's controlling perspective, her caring for the husband as action, the house as setting, the season as winter. Keeping the present time vague suits Millay's purpose of exploring the woman's inner self and thoughts because this vagueness permits a fluidity that specific units of time might render awkward. As I note above, the image that closes the first sonnet spans three lines and introduces parenthetically a retrospective view. (Parentheses also signal a flashback in sonnet 4). The language is visual as the woman goes "out for wood." She sees things in the present but herself in the past, a "warm day in spring."

Then sonnet 2, "The last white sawdust on the floor was grown / Gray as the first," focuses on time: "so long had he been ill" "a time it might not be," "when that small bird," and the closing words, "as it was drumming now." The second sonnet records a moment of suspended time within which the woman is transported back into the past, a state that is triggered by concrete, immediate details. Sawdust, axe, and drumming rain recall images from another season again in the retrospective view. The woman stands transfixed until the long closing line brings her back: "Upon this roof the rain would drum as it was drumming now." Deictic (orientational) features of the narrative situation signal the shift: proximate "this" and present "now." Sonnet 3 continues the present as she recalls her task: "She filled her arms with wood, and set her chin / Forward, to hold the highest stick in place."