An Ancient Gesture
Edna St. Vincent Millay was called the greatest
lyric poet of the twentieth century by her admirers.
‘‘An Ancient Gesture’’ was one of her last poems,
appearing in print after her death in the collection
Mine the Harvest(1954). Significantly, the poem
uses the myth of Penelope and Ulysses, as from
Homer’sOdyssey(in which he is called Odysseus),
to investigate the relationship between men and
women. Millay was drawn to classical literature,
which she could read in the original languages.
She was particularly influenced by classical lyric
poetry and by the Renaissance and nineteenth-
century lyric. ‘‘An Ancient Gesture’’ turns the
myth from Homer upside down, focusing on
Penelope’s grief in her marriage rather than on
her role as the perfect wife. The poem, spoken
probably by a housewife in Millay’s era, offers a
meditation on Penelope’s tears at her husband’s
absence, in ways the tears of all women, and then
compares and contrasts them to the tears of men,
as from the person of Ulysses.
This poem has been anthologized in recent
years for its feminist theme and skilled lyric evo-
cation of grief. Millay wrote it at the end of an
illustrious and famous career, by which time her
poetry was well known and loved from her numer-
ous reading tours and radio broadcasts. She
became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize
for Poetry in 1923, but by the late 1930s she was in
disfavor with the modernist critics who rejected
her sources in earlier lyric traditions. Such critics
admired poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
1EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
1954