1920 to 1922, she joined the American expatriates
in Paris and Europe, publishing fiction forVanity
Fairas well as her poems and plays. In 1923,The
Harp-Weaver, and Other Poemswon her the Pulit-
zer Prize for Poetry. Millay settled into a nonpos-
sessive marriage with the Dutch coffee importer
Eugen Boissevain the same year. He willingly
took second place to her and her career, taking
care of her delicate health on their farm, Steeple-
top, in Austerlitz, New York.
Millay wrote ‘‘The King’s Henchman,’’ an
opera libretto for the Metropolitan Opera, in
1927, andThe Buck in the Snow, a poetry collec-
tion published in 1928, was widely praised. Millay
was elected to the National Institute of Arts and
Letters in 1929 and won the Helen Haire Levinson
Prize for sonnets in 1931 for her poems inPoetry
magazine. After a torrid love affair with George
Dillon, a poet almost half her age, she wrote her
sonnet sequenceFatal Interview(1931).Wine from
These Grapes(1934) was a mature, philosophical
collection of poems, but a 1936 translation of
Charles Baudelaire’sFlowers of Evilwith George
Dillon won mixed reviews. The manuscript of
Conversation at Midnight, a philosophic discus-
sion in poetry, was lost in a hotel fire and had to
be rewritten, to be published in 1937. The poems
inHuntsman, What Quarry?(1939) began to
reflect the growing tension of another world war
to come.
Millay wrote a total of four plays, one opera
libretto, short fiction, and eleven collections of
poetry (one of which was posthumous); she also
acted in plays and won prizes and several hono-
rary degrees, becoming famous for the reading
tours and radio broadcasts through which she
made her poems popular with a general audience.
She championed such liberal causes as opposition
to the Nicola Sacco-Bartolomeo Vanzetti ruling
in 1927, and she urged America to fight Fascism
withMake Bright the Arrows(1940) and ‘‘The
Murder of Lidice’’ (1942). She agreed with critics
that her political poetry was inferior. After
receiving the Gold Medal of the Poetry Society
of America in 1943, she had a nervous break-
down and was unable to write for two years.
Millay’s husband died in 1949, and she did not
live long after, dying on October 19, 1950, after a
fall down the stairs at her home in Austerlitz.
Mine the Harvest, containing ‘‘An Ancient Ges-
ture,’’ was a posthumous volume of poems pub-
lished in 1954.The Collected Poems,editedbyher
sister Norma Ellis, was published in 1956.
POEM TEXTI thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner
of my apron:
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can’t keep weaving
all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your
neck gets tight; 5
And along towards morning, when you think it
will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you
don’t know where, for years,
Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.
And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the
corner of my apron: 10
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture,—a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too
moved to speak. 15
He learned it from Penelope...
Penelope, who really cried.POEM SUMMARYStanza 1
Line 1 of ‘‘An Ancient Gesture’’ introduces a first-
person speaker of the poem who appears to be a
housewife wiping her eyes on her apron as she
sheds tears. With the emotion, a thought comes
that gives some relief and perspective.
Line 2 is the thought, that Penelope also
cried. The line is a short, three-stress line, a direct
declaration. Most of the lines have five stresses
while varying in the number of syllables and
length; the three-stress lines state the forceful con-
clusions. The speaker compares herself to the clas-
sical heroine, Penelope, the faithful wife of the
Trojan War hero Ulysses. The apron is a homely
touch that connects the epic past of Homer’s
famousOdysseyto the everyday present world.
Penelope and the housewife both cry, and the
spontaneity of the gesture is emphasized by the
narrator’s wiping her tears on the nearest avail-
able thing, the apron. The speaker no doubt did
not expect to cry. She is probably in her kitchen,
in the middle of her work, without a handkerchief.
The significance of the comparison with Penelope
unfolds in the later lines.An Ancient Gesture