Sample Post I

Sonnet XXXVI, by Edna St. Vincent Millay*

Hearing your words, and not a word among them
Tuned to my liking, on a salty day
When inland woods were pushed by winds that flung them
Hissing to leeward like a ton of spray,
I thought how off Matinicus the tide
Came pounding in, came running through the Gut,
While from the Rock the warning whistle cried,
And children whimpered, and the doors blew shut;
There in the autumn when the men go forth,
With slapping skirts the island women stand
In gardens stripped and scattered, peering north,
With dahlia tubers dripping from the hand:
The wind of their endurance, driving south,
Flattened your words against your speaking mouth.

The first thing I notice about this poem (the title even tells you) is that it's a sonnet--a form composed of 14 lines with patterned meter and rhyme. This sonnet's rhyme scheme is ABABCDCDEFEFGG, with the rhymes grouped into three four-line sets and then the final couplet. In this particular poem, that final couplet does a lot of work--it adds the final ingredient that makes the poem's two pieces fall together and make sense. That couplet bridges the two very different scenes of the poem with a firm rhyme (south/mouth). Only the first five lines are Scene 1, in which a narrator is recounting an encounter with a person saying something hurtful or at the least unwanted. Then the next 8 lines are Scene 2, the narrator's memory of a past moment in a different place. By the time you're at line 13, it's easy to have let Scene 1 slip from your mind, in the face of all that descriptive detail about Matinicus. Then comes that final line, and that final rhyme-- it's the one rhyme in the poem that takes only one line to reach its resolution. It works like a stitch pulling tight, bringing the poem full circle in one stroke.

The other thing I find particularly interesting about this poem is that we don't know if the time in Matinicus was shared with the addressee or is something the speaker experienced apart. On the one hand, the poem is addressed to someone in particular, so that we can infer that the addressee might share the information about how it is on Matinicus when the wind blows--because otherwise, why would the speaker use that imagery to communicate to the addressee? But on the other hand, the impulse of the speaker seems to be to protect herself, and her very act of recalling this other time is a kind of retreat. Read this way, it's possible that her addressee has never seen Matinicus, and the speaker is using her private knowingness about it as a defense, as though she were saying "while you were telling me what I didn't want to hear, I took myself away to someplace you know nothing of; your words couldn't reach me there." In this case, the primary impulse of the poem is _not_ actually to communicate to the addressed person. Instead, it's like the letter you write to an ex, but never send--an attempt to respond to an injury without becoming vulnerable again to the person who injured you. I lean toward the latter reading, because it's a published poem, and so it's meant to communicate to us, the broad range of readers, more than to a specific person. This is one of my favorite breakup poems--there are enough of them out there to make a category in their own right. It must feel satisfying universally to make something beautiful and neat out of a profoundly unsatisfying and unresolved experience.

*This poem's not in the Vintage book. It's from a recent issue of _Poetry_ magazine, which you're free to choose poems from. Also you can pick from the archives on the Academy of American Poets or Poetry Daily Archives. If you do this, paste the poem into your blog entry so the rest of the class can read it without searching for it.