Siege by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Relentless Inevitabilities and Distractions
This I do, being mad:
Gather baubles about me,
Sit in a circle of toys, and all the time
Death beating the door in.
White jade and an orange pitcher,
Hindu idol, Chinese god, —
Maybe next year, when I'm richer —
Carved beads and a lotus pod. . . .
And all this time
Death beating the door in.
Hello and welcome to words that burn, the podcast taking a closer look at poetry. This week’s poem is siege by arguably one of the United states most celebrated poets Edna St. Vincent Millay. To say that Millay was a trailblazer is putting it lightly. In many senses she became a radiant symbol for the ‘’new woman’’ in the 1920’s.(Bolick n.d.) That is to say a woman, who would not be content constricted to the rigid and overly conservative gender roles of the previous century.
Indeed, the only word that could be used to describe Millay’s rise to popularity, when she was discovered at the age of 19 (McClatchy 2003.), would be stratospheric.
The poem that put her on the map so to speak was Renascence, which was apparently delivered by the poet herself to a rapt audience in a café her sister worked in.(Halley 2022)
The accounts of that particular evening are myth-making in the extreme and indeed any account of Millay’s performances spoke of the control she had over crowds, An innate ability to draw people in and make them fall in love with her.
As journalist Maggie Doherty wrote:
This enchantress is the Millay whom many came to know. She was a siren, a seductress, a candle burning with a “lovely light” before being unceremoniously snuffed out. ( Doherty 2022)
That unceremonious snuffing out would happen both for the poet's career and sadly for their life, but we'll get to that later. This reputation as an enchantress is something that Millais took to and continued to build on throughout her life. Her ability to bring people in was something she prided herself on (McClatchy 2003.). In an era long before anyone understood the concept of PR, Edna St. Vincent Millay understood that a life of scandal and stepping outside the social norm was the best way to remain relevant.
As a result of this she wrote fearlessly on a variety of topics, which up until that point hadn’t been touched upon by a female poet in centuries. Love, lust, desire, eroticism and hedonism all featured as staple themes in her work. When those did not drive her writing, radical politics of the day became her focus. She wrote poems and plays on Anarchism and Anti Materialism. Such was the breadth of her subject matter that eminent poetry editor of the time Harriet Monroe, wrote of Millay at the time : “that a certain living lady may perhaps be the greatest woman poet since Sappho.” (Monroe 1924)
Millay courted controversy where she could , engaging in bisexual flings and torrid love affairs with notable trendsetters of the day. She fulfilled that most famous of Oscar Wilde adages: There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
She was, of course, lauded and criticised in equal measure for her hedonistic lifestyle. As was characteristic for her she responded in verse. One of her most famous poems was born of her visibility it is called First Fig: My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
It is unfortunate that this poem, one of her earliest published works and most memorable, would become something of a self fulfilling prophecy for the poet.
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As you may have noticed, this week’s poem uses quite formal language but has flares of the modern within it. Millay was a great lover of the Petrarchan sonnet, a variation on the sonnet favoured by Italian Lyric poets of the middle ages(Hirsch 2017). And often used rigid poetic structure in her verse. (Poetry Foundation 2024)
Her love of more traditional forms placed her firmly outside the emerging modernist tradition of the early 20’s.This sadly did nothing for her long term reputation among critics. As academic Declan Ryan put it:
Millay was wedded to traditional forms, especially the sonnet, into which she breathed a great deal of new-womanish zeal, happily playing the part of the ingénue and then girl about town, embracing her reputation as a bed-hopping libertine. Her diction was often old-fashioned—sometimes knowingly, artfully so—going in for Elizabethan rhetorical unfurling or making hay with a kind of “who, me?” insouciance. (Ryan 2024)
This failure to ride the wave of modernism meant that Millay’s meteoric rise came to an abrupt halt when she went out of fashion. One could argue that there was even a backlash by critics later on and it suddenly became gauche to be a fan of her poetry.(Doherty 2022)
Maggie Doherty wrote a fascinating piece for the New Yorker, on how Millay’s story could be seen as a wonderful allegory for the pitfalls of rapid fame. I’ve linked it down below in the description as it’s a great read.
Her unjust fall from poetry grace has meant that Millay’s legacy today is that of the party poet girl of the roaring twenties and this, frankly, is a travesty. As Amandas Ong wrote for the Guardian:
For far too long, Millay’s work has been overshadowed by her reputation. A party girl poet. A sexually adventurous bisexual. A morphine addict. But then Millay also won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1923. (Ong 2018)
Millay won the Pulitzer for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, her collection from 1922. It is from that collection that this week’s poem Siege is taken. Ong goes on to write her article about the predatory nature of most of the biographies written about Millay. They highlight the scandal of her personal exploits and the unavoidable tragedy of her end. This however does nothing to highlight the power poetry that Millay was capable of writing. She wrote a style of poetry that was ardently feminist and forward thinking. In her verse and plays were themes of anti consumerism and mortality that remain as relevant today as they were when first published.
Siege , to me, is a perfect example of the thought provoking nature of Millay’s work and the depth and complexity she was able to bring about in just a few lines. I think it showcases her unique ability to write without resorting to her scandalous life and times for clicks.
A quick note on the structure of the poem before we begin. It's split into two quatrains ( a stanza consisting of four lines), and one couplet to finish. The rhyme scheme of the poem is a little inconsistent, with the first quatrain and final couplet having no set rhyme scheme but the second stanza following an ABAB scheme. There are several reasons that Millay may have done this which we will discover when we look at the first four lines:
This I do, being mad:
Gather baubles about me,
Sit in a circle of toys, and all the time
Death beating the door in.
The opening line is a gripping one, as is typical, of Millay’s work. Our speaker confronts the audience with the logic of everything that follows, or rather the absence of it; madness. Even in terms of sentence structure we can see Millay’s fondness for traditional forms shine through. It is almost Elizabethan in its layout.
From there we come to understand the speaker's unique form of madness, a compulsion to collect, they gather baubles and toys. The choice of words for their possessions are very deliberate. Baubles are trinkets or nick nacks, objects of little to no value other than sentimentality. This is given even more weight when we hear of them sitting in the middle of a circle of toys. Objects which could hardly be called priceless. We might wonder why Millay has chosen to portray possessions in such a fashion. In a few lines she has conjured an odd, almost gothic scene. In my own mind, I picture a high windowed room filled with pale light and piles of meaningless things. The reason for the seeming lack of value in all these things becomes clear midway through the third line:
and all the time
Death beating the door in.
Millay’s more modern sensibility makes itself apparent immediately: death beating the door in is a violent vibrant image that alludes far more to the Jazz age than to Shakespeare’s time. Millay establishes her understanding of mortality in an instant: Death in her poem , and in life, is relentless and it is coming for the speaker in the room and so the siege of the title is given a form .
The gothic idea hinted at in the first lines is given credence with the appearance of death. Her poetry here takes on a likeness to Emily Dickinson, a poet who frequently encountered death and the supernatural in her poetry.
In Millay's poem, death is not some grand concept but rather an earthbound thing that must physically attack a door to get in. Now on the one hand, this is obviously a metaphor for the inevitably of death and the awareness we all eventually gain of its coming. But on the other hand, giving death a more human form was commonplace for Millay. As academic John Timberman Newcomb put it:
[In her] familiar technique of personifying Death, Millay did not treat it as a vague metaphysical abstraction but instead as a specific and all-too-familiar figure.(Newcomb 1995)
Once we understand who is at the door, our speakers madness becomes clearer in the second stanza:
White jade and an orange pitcher,
Hindu idol, Chinese god, —
Maybe next year, when I'm richer —
Carved beads and a lotus pod. . . .
The speaker is counting their baubles in a series of lists. Each one represents how they are trying to distract themselves from the beating at the door. Some are luxuries of the home; White jade and an orange pitcher. Some are totems for religion, each one supposed to be a balm or reassurance that all does not end in death; Hindu idol, Chinese god, —Millay's choice to include such an international pantheon is intended to show that everyone is doing this; looking for a distraction from death, not just our speaker.
Hope and ambition make an appearance too: Maybe next year, when I'm richer — the drive to gather wealth is pointless, looking to the future does not remove the figure at the door.
Finally, more pointless things are listed: Carved beads and a lotus pod. . . . There are three distinct full stops to show the speaker trailing off, another modern motif from Millay. Our speaker is trailing off because their pile of possessions means nothing in the grand scheme of things.
As I said earlier, a rhyme scheme suddenly asserts itself. The reason is a clever use of poetic technique from Millais; the rhyming simply increases the pace of the poem. It introduces a hint of desperation to the stanza, one that our reader feels. As we rhyme, the lists increase in speed, and so the desperation mounts.
The first stanza moves at a leisurely pace, the toys hinting at the fact that our speaker might have youth on their side. The inclusion of wealth and religion in the second, along with that whiplash pace, shows us that not only has time moved on, but that it’s running out as well.
The Siege of the poems title continues, as all good sieges do, in the final couplet:
and all the time
Death beating the door in.
Millay has created a refrain here, a repetition of a single image. Because death is relentless. The refrain reminds us that no matter what amount of variation we bring into our lives, death remains the same.
All our speakers' efforts to distract themselves is for nothing. Death is still waiting in the wings, albeit a little aggressively here. That final couplet acts like a blow to the speaker. Their madness is that they think they can stop death with possessions, and the final couplet, a solid refrain, acts as a full stop to the poem.
Siege by Edna St. Vincent Millay is definitely not a modernist poem. For a start, it is a little too short and direct, but its ideology and clever structuring are distinctly of the movement that Millay is so often omitted from.
These days much of Millay’s poetry is lost in favour of focusing on the difficult life she led later on. I mentioned earlier that this poem became a kind of prophecy. Unfortunately , the literary fashion changed and one of the earliest examples of a literary rockstar was left behind. Millay did not take this well at all (Milford 2002) and this combined with a car accident led her to a life of addiction. She unfortunately passed away at the age of 58.
This poem proves though, that Millay’s literary success was not merely a result of her being fashionable for a time. I think Siege shows the work of a poet with an innate understanding of form, structure and imagery who on their best day could conjure images that seared themselves into a reader’s brain. I think academic J.D. McClatchy sums it up pretty well when he writes:
Millay could write poems with an obsessed, haunting power- … each a silver cage for the melancholy… poems that expose the banalities of more burly or experimental styles, and continue to touch the heart, disturb the intelligence and lodge in the memory.(McClatchy 2003)
What did you think of the poem? As always this is my interpretation and I’d love to hear yours. If you’d like to get in touch with me there are a few ways to do so.
Citations:
Bolick, K. n.d. “Working Girl.” Paperpile. Accessed February 8, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69953/working-girl
Doherty, Maggie. 2022. “How Fame Fed on Edna St. Vincent Millay.” The New Yorker, May 5, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/16/how-fame-fed-on-edna-st-vincent-millay-diaries-rapture-melancholy.
Halley, Catherine. 2022. “13 Ways of Looking at Edna St. Vincent Millay.” JSTOR Daily. April 22, 2022. https://daily.jstor.org/13-ways-of-looking-at-edna-st-vincent-millay/.
Hirsch, Edward. 2017. The Essential Poet’s Glossary. HarperCollins.
McCLATCHY, J. D. 2003 “Feeding on Havoc: The Poetics of Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Paperpile. Accessed February 8, 2024. https://paperpile.com/app/p/c1392b3f-45c8-00b8-bc47-888cd672ca21.
Milford, Nancy. 2002. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House Publishing Group.
Monroe, H.1924 “Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Paperpile. Accessed February 8, 2024. https://paperpile.com/app/p/fcdfe7d9-9263-0190-9c37-f937e9600dbe.
Newcomb, J.1995 “The Woman as Political Poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Mid-Century Canon.” Paperpile. Accessed February 8, 2024. https://paperpile.com/app/p/15f8e263-5f36-016b-a1c4-b7bf93a286a7.
Ong, Amandas. 2018. “Edna St Vincent Millay’s Poetry Has Been Eclipsed by Her Personal Life – Let's Change That.” The Guardian, February 22, 2018.
Poetry Foundation. 2024. “Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Poetry Foundation. February 7, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edna-st-vincent-millay.
Ryan, D. 2024. “Sound of the Axe on Fresh Wood.” Paperpile. Accessed February 8, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/157426/sound-of-the-axe-on-fresh-wood