Fatal Interview

by Edna St. Vincent Millay [Harpers, $2.00]

IT is astonishing with what appearance, at least, of freshness and spontaneity Edna St. Vincent Millay revives the little set of themes and conceits which have adorned love cycles from time immemorial. The lover meets her husband or paramour, and the anticipated train of consequences ensues; love’s mortality and immortality are saluted; the lover complains that the night is too short and the day too protracted; she protests the premature dawn; she fears that the passion supposed lifelong will prove fleeting; and in the concluding sonnets it does so. In so far as these familiar themes are realities of experience, they may always well up as if they had never been felt before in some actual lover or poet, and may surprise the world with the freshness and deathless youth of life’s most hackneyed episodes. But it is a question whether Miss Millay’s new sonnets owe much if anything to life, while it is past question that they owe a great deal to literature. One need not read a dozen of them to discover that they unite the conceits and refinements of the ‘metaphysical’ poets such as Donne (two lines of whose verse provide the book with its motto) with the descriptive powers and the richer harmonies or the Romantics. Examples could be multiplied of the use of familiar conceits in the dress of Romantic versification.

Since of no creature living the last breath
Is twice required, or twice the ultimate pain,
Seeing how to quit your arms is very death,
’T is likely that I shall not die again.

The fault of the ‘metaphysical’ poets was to push the conceit to an extreme of extravagance, to refine on fancies and analogies until they became absurdities. Miss Millay keeps her conceits within the bounds of reasonable acceptance, guards them from excess by weaving them with no small skill into the texture of her Romantic versification, which in its perfection of harmony must be counted among the most successful and beautiful aspects of the book. Indeed the harmony is almost too uninterrupted; it is almost glib.

The music, the ease, the descriptive aptitude, the phrase making, and the ingenious detail of the sonnets cannot fail to strike the reader with almost boundless admiration. Almost, for in the end it seems to me that for all their imagination and brilliance, their occasional rise into the true sphere of poetry, the sonnets give the air of being manufactured, of being wondrously clever, an extraordinary simulation rather than the true substance of poetry. Compared, for example, with Alice Meynell’s ’Renouncement,’in respect to genuineness of feeling, I doubt if one of the fifty-two would not seem calculated. Yet to say this is to put Miss Millay’s sonnets to the most severe and exacting test. By any lesser standard, they are altogether remarkable, brilliant, full of vivid imagination, ingenious and inventive in high degree. And here and there an individual sonnet seems to escape from any stricture and to silence any cavil.

THEODORE MORRISON