Sonnet XXXVI
by Claire Millikin
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.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay from Fatal Interview (1931)
The essence of the sonnet, as poet Terrance Hayes rightly argues, is the turn, the volta. The turn, the act of turning, on a surface reading seems to arrive right on cue at the end of Millay’s Shakespearean sonnet (with its epigraph from Donne) from her collection Fatal Interview. But this sonnet’s power in fact inheres in the turns that characterize the poem throughout. In this ceaseless turning, Millay’s Sonnet XXXVI is both Shakespearean and American.
The poem addresses a beloved with whom she is deeply disappointed, a scene from a love falling apart. Then the poet’s language quickly turns away from the speaker of unliked words and turns towards the natural world surrounding the romantic couple—the wind that reminds the poet (now living inland) of her youth by the ocean. This turn of attention, from the betrayal of the human beloved to the force and gritty glamour of the natural world, is followed by another turn, from the present to the past, from the inland wooded landscape of the present to the coastal landscape of the past. Now the poet specifies the landscape of midcoast Maine as her internal landscape, naming Matinicus. (Matinicus is an English gloss of the original Penobscot word, the word of the original people of this place for the offshore island). The poem turns again, while staying in the midcoast Maine of the poet’s past, to invoke the violence and power and beauty of the coastal storms and particularly evoking children whimpering with fear, and human structures overpowered by natural forces as doors blow shut. Now the poem turns yet again from childhood’s world to a return to the unloved gendered positionality of adult man and woman—fishermen pushing out to sea, and women left in desolate wind-sheared gardens.
In its final couplet, the poem’s ceaseless, edgy turning returns to the original scene of a man and woman arguing. Granted, nothing in the poem clearly reveals the speaker’s gender, nor the gender of the speaker’s beloved and, given Millay’s queerness, one should make no assumptions. And yet, the final six lines of the sonnet unmistakably call on gender dynamics of man and woman, in the context of betrayal and abandonment turned toin the context of apparently unconcerned natural force. In a final devastating and victorious turn, the poem culminates in the brilliant implication that the poet gains her power from the wind as she seamlessly merges the wind’s power with the force of the island women— the coastal Maine women—who are avatars of the poet’s childhood, who also are Millay herself.
Millay, if nothing else, was a midcoast Mainer, by birth and by custom, whatever else she later became. Here, in the closing couplet of Sonnet XXXVI, Millay claims that power—the strength of Maine’s midcoast women—envisioning her poetry as joined to and supported by the coastal wind’s force, this force that merges with the poet’s voice and silences the unwelcome words of the beloved in a gesture so defiantly physical and graphic it shocks: “Flattened your words against your speaking mouth.” The apparently amoral natural world, the wind and storms that blow up the coast no matter what human beings do, in the poem’s final couplet are revealed to have a moral force, and that force blends with the poet’s ability to silence the unkind words of her paramour. The word “endurance” here plays a pivotal role. The poet claims the endurance of Maine’s strong coastal women as her own strength. The beloved can try to speak unkindly to her, but she will overpower him with this brunt ability to endure, to hold on, and to silence romantic injustice in her favor. Not exactly a love poem, but rather a sonnet that reveals in painful clarity where we are when love goes wrong. Millay’s technical virtuosity here is subtle and gorgeous as she handles the sharp turns of the sonnet, like an experienced seafarer navigating home.
