“is he strong? listen, bud / he’s got radioactive blood”

For Poetry Monday, another Millay sonnet:


“One way there was of muting in the mind,” Edna St. V. Millay

One way there was of muting in the mind
A little while the ever-clamorous care;
And there was rapture, of a decent kind,
In making mean and ugly objects fair:
Soft-sooted kettle bottoms, that had been
Time after time set in above the fire,
Faucets, and candlesticks, corroded green,
To mine again from quarry; to attire
The shelves in paper petticoats, and tack
New oilcloth in the ringed-and-rotten's place,
Polish the stove till you could see your face,
And after nightfall rear an aching back
In a changed kitchen, bright as a new pin,
An advertisement, far too fine to cook a supper in.


This is from the sequence "An Ungrafted Tree," and I would call it not a sonnet* but a stanza from a narrative poem that happens to use sonnet-formed stanzas, but in her collected poetry it's placed in the section of sonnets, so sonnets they officially are. The work as a whole, btw, is excellent -- the best of her sequences -- and I commend it to everyone's attention.


* For one thing, no turn after line 8 -- and Millay not only knew her voltas but how to point them well.

---L.

Subject quote from Spider-Man, Paul Webster.