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Edna St. Vincent Millay's gendered language and form: "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree."
Style, Spring, 1995 by Irene R. Fairley
Itself a seed planted earlier (parenthetically in the opening sonnet), the apron recurs as dominant image in 11.(9) In sonnet 1, the expression "big-aproned" occurs in conjunction with "spring," "seeds," and "far blossoming," suggesting fertility like the aprons of early ballads (worn high as a sign of pregnancy). But it is a curious set of associations, for nowhere else does the sequence hint of childbearing, and the title certainly suggests the opposite. This image of early expectations is recalled to the woman when spring brings the battered apron "back to sight." Sonnet 11 returns to a quest initiated in sonnet 1. She must come to terms with the failure of the marriage.
Gender, sense, and structure are inseparable in this skillfully executed female sleight of hand. Sonnet 11, cast as one long sentence, begins, hesitates, expands, and completes in a revelation. The short main clause, "It came into her mind," which opens the poem, submerges only to surface more forcefully in the couplet's "It struck her." In both expressions "it" serves to delay the subject; the woman's realization is also delayed to the last line. The woman's reluctance is coded in the sonnet's structure. Her hesitancy is expressed by the repeated main clause, the need to begin again before achieving understanding.
The process begins with the woman's observations, embedded as a series of clauses between the parallel opening and closing structures. She sees in order of their ascending importance the brown grass, clothes-pins, and an apron. The sequence "an apron - long ago" is clearly foregrounded in the poem by the dash that signals a shift in time, a flashback, and by recurrence at long ago in such a night [Diagonal] Blown down and buried in the deepening drift." The sonnet contains two major parallelisms, then, one within the other; the two tokens of apron motif are enclosed between the nearly synonymous opening and closing clauses. The contained apron set also mirrors the hesitation of the main sentence: five lines of storm images intervene. Because of these delayed constructions and the further delay when we return to narrative present in line 13 -- "It struck her, as she pulled and pried and tore" (emphasis added) -- the long last line carries tremendous force: "That here was spring, and the whole year to be lived through once more."
The apron is more than "an article of domestic servitude ... a symbol for the woman's relinquished self" (Stanbrough 198). Of the critics, only James Gray calls it "a symbol of restoration," adding that it "could have come into the mind only of an observer who trusted her own intuitions" (28). The apron represents not "relinquished self" but submerged self. It is emblematic of the woman's condition, encoding her dilemma metonymically, and becomes the vehicle for her perception and her understanding. Images of the backward glance contained within the dashes are, indeed, violent. They provide a sense of her earlier life, especially the tenth line, "Blown down and buried in the deepening drift," echoing the first sonnet's "Blown back and forth" (also in line 10). Through sound Millay suggests the woman's experience of pain ("pane") and boredom ("board-stiff"). But Millay casts the woman herself as Actor, finally, in a compounded sequence of process. Her pulling, prying, and tearing take place in the spring at the discovery of the apron (Object, or Patient), "Forgotten, quaint and novel as a gift" like life itself. Like her "self" that she must actively pry free and work to release, once it surfaces.
