Millay is one of five compelling American female lyricists of the 1920s—the others are Elinor Wylie, Sara Teasdale, Léonie Adams, and Louise Bogan (in her first two books)—who have been mostly written out of literary history. These poets, skilled metricists, created a body of work that was essentially romantic at a time when Romanticism itself was in disrepute. Ignoring the stylistic revolution in American poetry inaugurated by Pound and Eliot, they generally observed the formal conventions of the traditional nineteenth-century Anglo-American short poem. Their carefully wrought poems have the quality, as Marianne Moore said about Bogan, of “compactness compacted.”
The work of these poets belongs to an alternative tradition of women’s poetry. Their poems—many of them comparable to Elizabethan songs—assert the authority of the female self through musical lyrics of personal experience. They are poets of an uncompromising subjectivity committed to emotion. In Bogan’s words, emotion is “the kernel which builds outward from inward intensity.” Their neo-Romantic aesthetic, through which they sought to capture the nuances and vagaries of female subjectivity with frank accuracy, was also a revolt against Victorian sentimentality, against pat emotion and conventional posturing, against excessive ornamentation. There is also a tension in their work between exuberant desire and the limitations imposed by writing in forms, the demands of clarity and precision. Millay was the most florid and expansive of these poets, Bogan the most clipped and austere, but each expressed a longing for escape within the confines of formal poetry. Love is the circumscribed subject in most of their poetry, partly because the love poem was a form of discourse that included women in a way that the poetry of history did not.
Millay wrote “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” (the title is the first line) in May 1920 and published it as the nineteenth sonnet in her book The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923).
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
Millay employs the classical model of the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet, which divides into two asymmetrical parts, an octave and a sestet. The longer octave traditionally sets the terms of a sonnet’s argument. A volta, or turn in the argument, usually introduces the shorter sestet, which brings the poem, and the argument, to a close. Like Petrarch, Millay builds an obsessive feeling in the octet that is let loose in the sestet. Her poem also has a strict Petrarchan rhyme scheme: abbaabba cdedce. Millay marshals her argument in two winding sentences that correspond exactly to the octave/sestet structure.
“What lips my lips have kissed” is driven by a self-dramatizing sense of loss. The opening spondee (“Whát líps”) seems to extol a lover’s adored physical features, as in “What remarkable lips.” The poem thus begins like a blazon, a form popularized by Petrarch and traditionally the domain of male writers, which catalogs the physical attributes of the beloved. But that is not the case. Millay intentionally begins the poem with a direct object, “lips,” rather than the subject, to create narrative suspense. She emphasizes three alliterative interrogative pronouns (“what,” “where,” and “why”), which allude to the mystery of the speaker’s sexual encounters. After the firmly end-stopped first line she brutally undercuts the expectation of praise for a lover: “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, / I have forgotten.” Now the reader understands “What lips” very differently, as in “Whatever lips.” Millay then adds a second forgotten object (“what arms have lain”), which dangles at the end of the main clause and the second line.
The sentence shifts after the semicolon in the third line: “but the rain / Is full of ghosts tonight.” This startling enjambment moves the poem from details remembered in the present perfect tense (“what arms have lain”) to the scene unfolding in the present tense (“the rain / Is full of ghosts”). Just as Hardy’s and Thomas’s poems feature voices in the wind and in the owl’s cry, this speaker hears ghosts in the sound of the rain. She imagines that they “tap and sigh / Upon the glass and listen for reply.” But because these ghosts are “unremembered lads,” the speaker has no reply, just “a quiet pain,” which beautifully rhymes with “not again.” The octave closes “at midnight”—recall from Cavafy’s “The God Abandons Antony” that in poetry midnight is traditionally a time of revelation—“with a cry.” The lover’s cry could be a cry of recognition, of sadness, of orgasm. “One of the emotional archetypes of the Petrarchan sonnet structure,” the scholar Paul Fussell dryly observes, “is the pattern of sexual pressure and release.”
Millay’s sonnet turns on the argumentative term “Thus,” which associates the “quiet pain” of the solitary speaker with the image of a tree in winter. Notice also how the sestet starts with a trochee, stressing “Thus,” which breaks the poem’s somewhat strict iambic pentameter. Unaware of the birds that have gradually disappeared, “the lonely tree” still somehow “knows” that its branches are “more silent than before.” Here Millay is referencing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, which famously opens:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In his love poem Shakespeare uses the metaphor of the season turning to winter (along with day turning to night and fire turning to ash) to characterize the speaker’s aging and to praise a beloved “thou” for loving someone who will soon be gone.
Given that Millay was twenty-eight when she wrote her sonnet, she appropriates Shakespeare’s image of aging to express a sense of world-weariness, the loneliness and sorrow of feeling spent at a young age. After all, two years before, the sexually adventurous poet notably penned the four-line “First Fig,” which begins, “My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night.” Millay’s somewhat antiquated diction, which also harkens back to Shakespeare, adds to the sense that the poet feels old for her age. As the poet Eavan Boland points out, “Her diction reached back to an invented past.” But unlike Shakespeare’s loyal “thou,” no adored addressee appears in this poem, only the “unremembered lads,” an absence that makes Millay’s reimagining a sort of anti–love sonnet, a sonnet of vanished intimacies.
After the description of the tree in winter the sestet divides neatly into two parts separated by a colon. The “I” returns to the poem, and the speaker equates the tree’s silent, bare boughs with her own loneliness:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
The speaker once again reminds us that she can’t remember any specific loves. However, she reveals what she does “know” in a heartbreaking enjambment: “that summer sang in me / A little while.” Notice that it is summer that sings, rather than the birds, a lovely alliterative substitution, which emphasizes the young speaker’s awareness that a season of her life has passed. As in the beginning of the first line, the last line ends emphatically with a spondee, the agonizing “no more,” which echoes “not again” and stresses the poem’s measured sense of finality.
For Millay, the ripeness and burning of Apollinaire’s summer is behind her. A sense of treasured things lost—emotional intimacy, physical contact, companionship, youthful innocenc
e—pervades this sonnet, which stands, like the lonely tree, as a powerful testimony to one woman’s unflinching look at her own solitude.
Langston Hughes
* * *
“Song for a Dark Girl”
(1927)
Langston Hughes wrote “Song for a Dark Girl” in 1927. It is one of his nearly three dozen poems that speak out against the violent lynching of African Americans, a notorious grotesquerie of US history. The tradition of lynching poems probably began with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s mock-Romantic ballad “The Haunted Oak” (1900), which takes the point of view of the tree where a lynching takes place. Black poets of the early twentieth century, such as Claude McKay and Lesley Pinckney Hill, continued the tradition, followed by an imposing array of poets from the 1920s to the present, including Richard Wright, Robert Hayden, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lord, Elizabeth Alexander, and Patricia Smith, among many others. Langston Hughes’s lynching poems stand out in a subgenre of outraged elegiac responses to this sickening barbarism and racist spectacle.
Song for a Dark Girl
Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a cross roads tree.
* * *
Way Down South in Dixie
(Bruised body high in air)
I asked the white Lord Jesus
What was the use of prayer.
* * *
Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
Love is a naked shadow
On a gnarled and naked tree.
The title “Song for a Dark Girl” is ambiguous, especially as concerns the identity of the speaker. Is the poem a song for the dark girl to sing so that she can mourn her murdered lover? Is it a song written to memorialize a “dark girl” who has been lynched? Or is the poem, as a few critics have suggested, a song the speaker is singing to a young Black woman? Most read the poem as a song for a heartbroken girl to sing, but since the pronouns are indeterminate, there is no conclusive way to ascertain the gender or identity of the speaker, relative to the dark girl of the title.
No matter how one reads the title, Hughes brilliantly combines in just three quatrains a soulful elegy, a spiritual reckoning, a critique of racism, a scathing commentary on the South, and a stark vision of a lynching. Hughes indents the second and fourth lines of each stanza, as in a hymn or a short ballad. He also uses a pattern of end-rhymes, aaba in the first and last stanzas, abcb in the middle stanza. The rhythm and rhymes of the poem’s bluesy three-beat lines have a kind of lilt that is hauntingly undermined by the poem’s subject matter, the scene of a mourner looking up at the body of a dead lover.
Though the poem on its own is a formidable and horrifying testimony to the cruelty of lynching, it is all the more powerful when read in dialogue with the infamous Confederate anthem “Dixie.” Purportedly written by a white Ohio-born minstrel-show composer, the lyrics of “Dixie” recount, in exaggerated African American dialect, the longing of a freed slave to return to the South and the plantation life there. This falsely nostalgic, sentimental racist fantasy was an immediate hit, performed at minstrel shows by singers in blackface, and it became so popular throughout the 1860s that it was eventually adopted by Southern secessionists. Here is the song’s refrain:
I wish I was in Dixie, Hoo-ray! Hoo-ray!
In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie;
Away, away, away down south in Dixie,
Away, away, away down south in Dixie.
Hughes takes the final lines of this refrain and uses a shortened version—“Way Down South in Dixie”—as the refrain in his poem. He capitalizes the four main refrain words for emphasis, as a reminder of the song’s racist origins. Though a refrain line typically closes each stanza in a poem, Hughes begins his stanzas with the refrain. This way the refrain sets up the subsequent lines in each stanza as a response to the source song, so that the twisted sentiment of “Dixie” echoes through, and is undermined by, each stanza. With every repetition the refrain becomes more and more ironic, more and more damning.
Hughes follows each refrain with a line in parentheses, which acts as a personal commentary, a slyly defiant answer to, and qualifying of, the refrain. Notice how Hughes doesn’t say “(break my heart)” but rather “(Break the heart of me).” At this early point in the poem lynching hasn’t been mentioned, so the odd diction of “Break the heart of me” signals a broader definition of “heart,” meaning not only a lover’s feelings, but also “the heart” of a person, their very core, which is broken by being “Way Down South.” Lynching comes to the poem in the third line, a simple, shocking statement—“They hung my black young lover”—with three beats hammering on “hung,” “black,” “love,” and the perpetrators of this violence an eerie unnamed “They.” The fourth line locates this hanging at “a cross roads tree,” an image that immediately conjures the cross of the crucifixion.
In the second stanza the refrain is followed by “(Bruised body high in air),” a description that emphasizes the harshly battered physicality of this corpse. As opposed to “Way Down South” the body hangs “high in air,” which also implicitly contrasts with the place where a corpse should rest, below, in the ground. The word “high” also suggests “on high” or “in heaven”—the African America poet Phillis Wheatley writes, for example, of “heav’n’s unmeasur’d height,” where redeemed souls go, according to Christian belief. This poem’s body, however, remains paradoxically “high in air” rather than in heaven, and bound to earth, a lifeless reproach.
The lover asks “the white Lord Jesus / What was the use of prayer.” Hughes deliberately places “white Lord Jesus” in exactly the same position in the second stanza as “black young lover” in the first stanza; both phrases have the same number of syllables, with accents falling in the same places, thus creating a direct formal and symbolic parallel between the two. The Black body sacrificed at the crossroads becomes more Christ-like than the white Jesus, who seems to condone brutal racial injustice. These lines are also an indictment of white Christian Southerners, the “They” of the previous stanza, who used scripture and Christian theology to try to convince antislavery proponents that the cruelty of human bondage was ordained by God, to try to convince enslaved people themselves to accept their servitude as part of God’s natural order, and later to justify thousands of post–Civil War lynchings. The speaker poses what looks like the first part of a prayer, “I asked the white Lord Jesus,” and then ironically points out the futility of praying to a white Jesus by asking, “What was the use of prayer.” There is no question mark at the end of this rhetorical question, which makes it a statement.
When the refrain and parenthetical words of the first stanza return in the final stanza, they carry the full weight of the poem’s devastating denunciation of the sentiment of “Dixie.” The poem concludes that in a violent and racist South, “Love is a naked shadow.” This line can be read as the mourner’s bleak description of the lover’s hanging body, as in “My lover is now just a naked corpse, a shadow or a ghost.” It can also be interpreted as a metaphorical statement about a lack of human compassion, as in “In the racist South, love itself is a ghost, a shadow with no object to cast it.” The “naked shadow” hangs “On a gnarled and naked tree,” the repetition of the word “naked” emphasizing the exposure of this Black body, and the bodies of all African Americans, to the cruelty of racism. The alliterative “gnarled and naked tree” calls to mind a tree that bears no fruit, the opposite of the apple tree in the original garden. This is the bare or fruitless apple tree that will appear at the crossroads of the Robert Johnson legend, the place where he supposedly sold his soul to the devil.
Hughes’s iconic poem makes its case against racial hatred by using a series of categorical reversals. As the scholar Jahan Ramazani astutely puts it, “Crossing white and black, up and down, mortal and divine, good and bad, deity and demon, the poem adopts t
he bewildered perspective of the melancholic mourner who gains no consolation from her prayer to a compromised God, but who edges toward finding ‘Love’ in her dead lover, divinity in the mortal love she feels for him.” In the ultimate reversal Hughes takes an offensive minstrel standard, a comic white song form composed of false racist sentiments about Southern plantation life and sung by an actor in blackface, and uses lines from its refrain as a starting point for a heart-wrenching elegy based on the blues, an innovative Black song form.
Charlotte Mew
* * *
“Rooms”
(c. 1929)
The English poet Charlotte Mew was a writer of smoldering intensities. Like Thomas Hardy, who considered her “far and away the best living woman poet,” Mew was metrically adventurous and outwardly traditional, partly a Victorian, partly a modernist. She is usually associated with the early-twentieth-century Georgian poets, whose name alludes to the reign of George V. However, since that group consisted almost exclusively of male poets, Mew is something of an outlier. Her irregular rhythms and rhyming free-verse experiments give her poems a different kind of offbeat energy. Her romantic focus on women also lends it a proto-feminist perspective. She wrote two books of poems, The Farmer’s Bride (1916) and The Rambling Sailor (1929), which appeared posthumously. She often used the dramatic monologue to give voice to her own feelings and experience under the guise of an assumed persona. Here is her poem “Rooms,” which is undated and may have been too revealing to publish in her lifetime.
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 6
