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

Style, Spring, 1995 by Irene R. Fairley

On the surface not much happens in the first three sonnets. The woman goes out and gathers some wood. But by informing us in the opening lines of the sequence that the husband dies, Millay alerts us to look elsewhere for the drama. The first three sonnets work as a group to set the main action of the sequence: coming to terms with the past. They also introduce the vehicle of domestic chores.

Sonnets 2 and 3 present Millay's reflective sonnet structure. The second sonnet runs on with semicolons linking clauses (rather than periods that would separate). Then commas and dashes serve as the reverie takes hold. In 3 we find an even more fluid movement - the freest of the entire sequence - with commas providing the only punctuation up to the closing period. As if a reflex response, the strange intensity of the recollection in sonnet 2 drives the woman to her task, which provides escape from painful thoughts. She selects "hastily small sticks of birch," "nor thinking to return." By concentrating upon the external present, she hopes to avoid both future and past.

But they are unavoidable. Just as parentheses signal a shift in time (flashback) in closing sonnet 1, they signal a premonition (or flash-forward) in closing sonnet 3:

(That day when dust is on the wood-box floor,

And some old catalogue, and a brown, shriveled

apple core).

An unlikely pairing, "wood-box floor" and "apple core" bring together major semiotic codes within the sequence and within the two sets of parentheses. The earlier pregnant image of "seeds" and "blossoming" aborts with this bitter image of discarded core, a failed fruiting. Millay links up spatial codes, vertical and horizontal dimensions in the dust-as-floor and vine-as-tree images. Epiphanically, the parentheses of 3 answer those of 1, a shriveled apple core and woodbox imaging the husband's death and burial.

The woman is revealed in sonnets 2 and 3 in a manner very similar to that of sonnet 7, the third reflective sonnet of the group. Between, in sonnets 4-6, she takes up familiar chores and through them is reminded of the past. We hear her more conscious questions: she is more "mindful" (4), for example, "praying that he might not see" (5), and asking "How came the soda there? The sugar here?" (6). While doing "familiar" (6) tasks with "accustomed care," she notes the odd location of pantry items: things are out of order. The closing image of the woman forcing the grocery "trade-slip on the nail that held his razor strop" suggests a reckoning ahead.

Sonnet 7, opening with "One way there was of muting in the mind / A little while the ever-clamorous care," is the only one in the sequence that bears no deictic reference to the woman though it is clearly integral. While pronoun references abound in the other sonnets, this one deliberately contains neither she nor her so that it is easily generalized as an expression from female experience, one familiar to Millay (see note 8): "Polish the stove till you could see your face, / And after nightfall rear an aching back"; "One way there was of muting in the mind / A little while the ever-clamorous care" (emphasis added). The deictic feature that makes it impersonal is symptomatic of the woman's state. Cleaning the kitchen is an activity that takes the woman out of herself, turning her into the universal "you." She loses a sense of self by concentrating upon a familiar task, an activity this sonnet recreates.