On Thought in Harness
by Mark Raymond
My falcon to my wrist
Returns
From no high air.
I sent her toward the sun that burns
Above the mist;
But she has not been there.
Her talons are not cold; her beak
Is closed upon no wonder;
Her head stinks of its hood, her feathers reek
Of me, that quake at the thunder.
Degraded bird, I give you back your eyes forever, ascend now whither you are tossed;
Forsake this wrist, forsake this rhyme;
Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost,
But climb.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Wine from These Grapes (1934)
Neither Millay nor her editors call this poem a sonnet, and, on the page, it certainly doesn’t look like one. Aren’t sonnets boxy things? The line lengths here are all over the place, some clipped, some stretched, the meter ragged and wavering.
But look (and listen) to the pattern of the rhymes. “On Thought in Harness” shows us fourteen lines (and nothing says sonnet like fourteen lines) in an ABCBCA DEDE FGFG rhyme scheme, an inverted Petrarchan sestet over an octave.
What happens when you turn a Petrarchan sonnet on its head? What happens when you rip open a sonnet’s box and tear off half the form’s metrical regularity? Are you left with something broken and skewed, a poem almost free verse, a poem getting a bit wild, a bit out of control?
The rhymes are there (although sonnet-wise upside down), but Millay’s disempowered most of our sonnet expectations, especially on a first reading. Chances are, we get the sonnet effects only on the backend of experiencing the text. Instead, the poet forefronts her description of the bird, which clearly is an avatar for some aspect of herself, her personality, her career. As Romantic-haunted Modernists, we expect the falcon imagery to reflect the speaker’s/poet’s mind (the title says as much: “On Thought in Harness”).
Millay’s bird is female, so gender is immediately invoked (recalling how gendered power dynamics are increasing at play in her mature sonnet sequences, like “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree” and Fatal Interview). Moreover, in the ancient sport of falconry, females were the hunting birds of choice. In birds of prey, like falcons and hawks, sexual dimorphism leads to females growing much larger than males, often outweighing them by a third or more. People still train falcons today (think of Mabel from H Is for Hawk), but the practice has an immediate Tudor vibe. It’s courtly, traditionally aristocratic, it’s got medieval chops. It could be a cohort of sonneteering in its most Elizabethan sense, and as a literary trope it’s tied up in old-school misogyny (the predominance of the female in falconry, how birds were kept and trained, led to some easy metaphors of a dangerously wild gender that needed to be controlled).1
The poem channels a combustible package of desire, restraint and risk, possessing and letting go. The line that breaks open the whole thing, that imperative for the bird to “forsake this rhyme,” explodes the inner and outer worlds of the text. What does it mean for “thought” to forsake a poem? How does that even work? Is the tenor escaping the vehicle or the vehicle escaping the tenor?
I can’t say exactly what Millay was thinking about when she wrote this poem. The 1930s were the volta in her career, when things started to go sideways. Taking on social and political themes, she pointedly composed collections like Wine from these Grapes that contained no overt love poems, her wonted métier. The influential New Criticism critics called them “failures” and “immature” (Cleanth Brooks is particularly harsh—no well-wrought urn for Vincent). This is all before the car accident left her with pain and morphine, before America joined the war.
Few poetic forms act the harness as much as the sonnet—so much tradition, so many rules. It’s curious: one is tempted to say that, if Millay’s falcon can forsake its rhyme, the bird escapes the poem by flying off with those parts that would have completed it as a sonnet.
The departure of the bird itself (whatever she symbolizes or tropes upon) breaks the poem and keeps it from being a sonnet. The freed falcon becomes a potential lack in the text (it’s always been an image of desire and not really there, the MacGuffin, the stuff that dreams are made of, as Shakespeare and Sam Spade would say), and its escape from the text (which it can never leave) results in an incomplete, uncontained sonnet.
Today, we would call it a transgressively American sonnet, a through-line in the sonnet’s genealogy that wasn’t available to Millay in the 1930s but which her mastery of the form and her fascinating but seldom-marked experimentations within its constraints seem to anticipate.
1.Modern falconry hobbyist associations date from the 1920s in the UK but only appear in the ’60s in the US. It’s unclear if Millay herself had any hands-on exposure to the sport. Her interest may be literary and historical.
