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On "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" Millay's analysis of the courage of women and the authority of the female experience is offered in her finest sonnet-sequence, "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree." This beautifully poised early narrative, set on a bleak New England farm, explores the privations of a failed marriage from the point of view of a disillusioned wife who left her husband but, hearing that he is ill, "came back into this house again / And watched beside his bed until he died, / Loving him not at all." Millay here celebrates womanly "endurance," documenting her argument with domestic details which become resonant symbols of both the daily drudgery against which her protagonist's spirit must contend and the determination to survive through which this woman transforms housewifery into heroism Significantly, it is only when the husband dies that he becomes a figure of tragic dignity and, indeed, an icon of new life for his widow. The concluding sonnet of "An Ungrafted Tree" examines the inscrutability of death in a manner reminiscent of such great modernist meditations as Rainer Maria Rilke's "Corpse-Washing" or D.H. Lawrence's short story "Odour of Chrysanthemums." But where Rilke emphasizes the corpse washer's recognition of the dead man's authority and the widow in Lawrence's story feels "fear and shame" at the otherness of her dead husband, Millay's protagonist feels joy that his new stranger is "not hers, unclassified" and, by implication, exultation that she is no longer his and classified.
In January 1922, [Millay wrote in a letter to Arthur Ficke]: "I hold a very nervous pen lately. Does your hand get that way sometimes, so that you want to dig in the earth with it, or whittle it, or thrust it into a broad fat back, anything but write with it?" (Letters, 143). In "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" it is possible to see her using her art to develop a perspective on the aggressive impulses she was feeling This sonnet sequence is notable in Millay for its rendering of character, its imagism (since almost everything is "told" in pictures of the body and the domestic and natural worlds), and for its restraint. We are never informed of the reasons the woman left her husband or precisely why she returned "loving him not at all." As readers we are the ones who see her engaging in the tasks assigned to women: setting the house to rights, making the tea and the fire, giving "of her body's strength" to the man as though he were a child whose hands needed steadying about the cup. Furthermore, Millay invites us to see this woman's impulses as both mediated by culture and masochistic in the sense Mary Ryan uses that term, where gratification comes from an activity which is stressful and self-defeating. Like a magazine housewife, this woman learns to
The use of "you" and "your" seems to make this activity a ritual of capitalism, "an advertisement" of the role assigned to women who must make their kitchen "bright as a new pin" despite the fact that it then becomes unusable. The last line of the couplet, with its extra syllables, suggests a metaphor for the disillusionment the woman feels with her life in general. In pursuing the pattern of romantic love given by patriarchy, she discovers not that her husband is a brute, but that he becomes an accomplice in continuing, rather than a partner in terminating, her frustration. The woman now seems to feel that her body has in some way betrayed her. By flashing a mirror in her eyes at school, [her husband] appeared to give her her body in a new way. He appealed to her narcissism. But like the male gaze which promises subjectivity to the woman only to betray that promise in the end, desire for the other's body that is actually desire for her own selfhood confuses the woman as to her real goal. The young woman cannot know herself by looking into this mirror. But she believes her needs addressed by the desire he seems to arouse in her: "And if the man were not her spirit's mate, / Why was her body sluggish with desire?" Only when her husband is dead, and "From his desirous body the great heat / Was gone at last," can she begin to find her own way. At the end the poet says:
In this way she becomes "an ungrafted tree," set free from her younger self who has been inscribed within the structure of another's life. The poem suggests that even during their separation the woman was not wholly free, so that when she returns to "the wan dream that was her waking day," she is merely "borne along the ground / Without her own volition." Who, then, is the "strange sleeper on a malignant bed"? Is it her husband or herself, grafted onto his need for her?
In "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" Millay relates the experience of "the New England woman" who returns in winter to her dying husband's house to care for him although she has no love for him. The stark directness and the physical and psychological realism of the sequence are notable. The same observation of details that one finds, for example, in "Souvenir" appears in these sonnets with utmost vividness; the startling precision of the imagery, both visual and auditory, is impressive Sister M. Madeleva [Chaucer's Nuns and Other Essays. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1925; 144-53.] thought the sonnets of this sequence were "so deeply rooted in New England soil that they might have been done by Robert Frost." In fact, she thought Frost "unquestionably" Millay's teacher. True, the situation might make one think of "The Hill Wife" and "An Old Man's Winter Night"; but Millay's work in its rhythms and in its use of concrete detail is much closer to the honest, direct poetry of the early William Morris. As a sonnet sequence, it is related to [George] Meredith's Modern Love and [Arthur Davison] Ficke's Sonnets of a Portrait Painter Meredith used a sixteen-line "sonnet" in Modern Love; similarly, Millay took liberties with the sonnet form in "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree." She used three quatrains and a couplet, but the third quatrain rhymes e f f e, and the fourteenth line has seven feet. The usual Shakespearean content-divisions are ignored in most of the sonnets, which are treated as stanzas, fourteeners.
"Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" is flawlessly realized, without hiding its rigor. Intense feeling goes with "chastity of soul," and the humblest of details, like the commonest of creatures, win dignity from the art they incite, both to very great height and to equally great depth.
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