Edna Saint Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was among the most admired poets during her lifetime. Many of her poems explored themes of love and mortality, crafted in traditional Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet forms. But as the Modernism of T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens began to dominate poetry aesthetically and intellectually in the 1920’s, her popularity faded, and critics considered her style of writing too old-fashioned and emotional. By the 1960’s, she did regain some degree of popularity as feminists extolled her frank depiction of an independent female uninhibited by the strictures of the American puritanical culture. Both of these views are correct; many of Millay’s poems are old-fashioned and emotional, but many are also strongly feminist. Take for example “Oh, think not that I am faithful to a vow,” a sonnet that deftly employs an ironic feminist’s assertion and recalls the Renaissance poetry of John Donne, who poems were mostly forgotten until he was championed by the high priest of Modernism himself T. S. Eliot.
Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow! Faithless am I save to love's self alone. Were you not lovely I would leave you now: After the feet of beauty fly my own. Were you not still my hunger's rarest food, And water ever to my wildest thirst, I would desert you -- think not but I would! -- And seek another as I sought you first. But you are mobile as the veering air, And all your charms more changeful than the tide, Wherefore to be inconstant is no care: I have but to continue at your side. So wanton, light and false, my love, are you, I am most faithful when I most am true.
The opening line’s assertion upends what one might normally expect on first reading the poem. We stop after the first line, wonder if we have misread it, then go back and reread it. This is surprising because it comes from a woman speaker who writing in an antiquated style (for the 1920’s), which raise the expectation of something along the lines of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning expression of love and passionate devotion. The speaker issues a second assertion in the second line, telling what in fact commands her true loyalty: “Faithless am I save to love’s self alone.” If one were to stop again and sift the meaning from these lines, it seems that the speaker might be pledging herself to some abstract or idealized concept of love. But that thought is immediately cancelled by the next line when she admits that “Were you not lovely I would leave you now”. Clearly, the physical loveliness of her lover compels her to remain, and the significance of line 2 comes into clearer focus. When she claims to be only faithful to “love’s self,” (“Faithless am I save to love’s self alone.”), she is defining love as purely an irresistible physical attraction to another. This attraction becomes the metaphors of lines 5 and 6: “Were you not still my hunger’s rarest food,/And water ever to my wildest thirst”.
At line 7, we are halfway through the sentence that constructs the sonnet’s second quatrain and have encountered the concrete example of what she means by her inverted declaration of the first line. Once again, she asserts that she would leave him. She states, “I would desert you — think not but I would! —” and then offers the most peculiar and curious reason for her not leaving, that he is “mobile as the veering air/And all your charms more changeful than the tide.” And since he is “So wanton, light and false,” she is “most faithful when” she is “most true.” But what is she “most true” to? Unencumbered by standard “male” strictures of female fidelity, Millay pledges herself to experiencing and fulfilling her carnal desires. Therefore, she persists in relishing him physically and sexually regardless of his infidelity. That she does so in the enclosed structure of a Shakespearean sonnet perhaps put off modernist critics. But the feminists of the 1960’s and 1970’s appreciated both her style and striking content.
Like Millay, John Donne’s poetry was admired during his lifetime, but fell out of fashion after his death. In his case, his poetry went largely unnoticed until the modernist poets and poetry that thought Millay’s poems “old fashioned” and sentimental found in his poetry a fascinating blending of intense passion and encyclopedic intellect. Donne composed some of the best love poems in the English language. Nevertheless, readers new to his work will find even his most melodic poems intellectually difficult because he deftly infuses his verse with theology, philosophy, law, science, medicine, mythology, and sea exploration in some rather complex syntax. A good place to begin with Donne is to sample some of his humorous verse. Here’s a poem that shows his quick mind and clever wit:
Woman's Constancy
Now thou hast lov'd me one whole day,
Tomorrow when thou leav'st, what wilt thou say?
Wilt thou then Antedate some new made vow?
Or say that now
We are not just those persons, which we were?
Or, that oaths made in reverential fear
Of Love, and his wrath, any may forswear?
Or, as true deaths, true marriages untie,
So lover's contracts, images of those,
Bind but till sleep, death's image, them unloose?
Or, you own end to Justify,
For having purposed change, and falsehood; you
Can have no way but falsehood to be true?
Vain lunatic, against these scapes I could
Dispute, and conquer, if I would,
Which I abstain to do,
For by tomorrow, I may think so too. The abrupt initial question opens an aggressive interrogation the speaker employs to imagine the excuses his lover will raise as she attempts to end their “brief” affair. He anticipates an impressive array of reasons she could list to nullify the vow she made. She could claim she is already promised to another man. That they are not the same “persons” “now.” That her vow to him was made out of “fear.” That just as death dissolves the marriage bond, so too does sleep (In Donne’s time, sleep was death’s second self.) That since she has “purposed change and falsehood” she has no '“way”/choice but to follow through and leave him. The accusations the speaker predicts she might use to justify leaving him he could easily “Dispute, and conquer,” if he chooses to. But ultimately, he would not, since as the final line informs us, he might “think so too.”
This poem gives readers a sample of Donne’s humorous dexterity in verse. We read through the poem speeding inexorably toward what we think will be a knockout condemnation of the female and instead we are whiplashed by the startling last line. Millay and Donne both regained status within the cannon of poetry, Donne’s obviously more prominent, but how much will they be read in the next fifty or hundred years?