Penelope is not only virtuous and loyal but also
clever in her strategy to hold off the suitors. Millay
retells the story, however, as an example of how
someone experiences intense grief, comparing the
spontaneous tears of the speaker to Penelope’s
weeping from loneliness and long suffering. Millay
presents a new perspective by implying that
Penelope was as much a hero as Ulysses, per-
haps more so.
Other modern poets, such as William Butler
Yeats (in ‘‘Leda and the Swan’’), William Carlos
Williams (in ‘‘Venus over the Desert’’), Denise
Levertov (in ‘‘Hymn to Eros’’), Ezra Pound (in
‘‘Pan Is Dead’’), and Rainer Maria Rilke (inThe
Sonnets to Orpheus), have used classical stories,
figures, and motifs in a modern context, drawing
from the rich and abundant source material of
Greek and Roman mythology in ways that reflect
modern concerns. Millay took herself seriously as
a poet and took advantage of the right of all
authors to tap into the common Western and
classical traditions to reinvent them for her time.
Twentieth-Century Modern Poetry
Although many critics fault Millay for not having
been in step with the developments of modernism,
with its ambiguity, objectivity, numerous intellec-
tual references, and ironic tone as represented by
such poets as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, her poems
have several characteristics of the twentieth-century
poetry of her day. For instance, her poems embrace
modern subject matter anddetail, directness, and
openness to changing poetic form. She was heavily
influenced by classical themes and by European
Renaissance and romantic literature, and yet, like
other modern poets, she viewed old traditions from
new angles. She thus used her poetry to comment
on social events and situations of the day, such as in
her free-verse poem ‘‘Apostrophe to Man’’ (1934), a
pessimistic piece about the failures of the human
race, anticipating the mood of W. H. Auden in his
famous poem about the outbreak of World War II,
‘‘September 1, 1939.’’
In ‘‘An Ancient Gesture,’’ an old story is given
a new and feminist interpretation in which the
woman’s story (Penelope’s) is favored, while the
man’s fame (Ulysses’) is exposed as exaggerated.
Despite the historical distance of millennia, Pene-
lope and Ulysses seem to mimic a modern mar-
riageinwhichthewifeisneglectedathome,while
the husband is unavailable. The sense of irony
here, so characteristic of modern poetry, underlies
the simple, lyric quality of the woman’s lament.
The more old-fashioned elements—the classical
allusions, the lyric repetition and rhyme—are at
odds with the modern diction. The vocabulary
and feeling thus create an informal and contem-
porary mood. Myth is used to probe a psycholog-
ical state, and grief is given a contemporary
description. Millay’s style puts her in company
with other modern poets who combined older
poetic elements with modern irony, such as Rob-
ert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Amy Lowell, Edwin
Arlington Robinson, and Elinor Wylie.
Looseness of form is apparent in the semifree
verse of the two uneven stanzas. Free verse is
widely used in modern poetry, where the lines
can be any length, and there can be rhyme, but
usually no regular rhyme scheme or meter is
evident. Free verse is often fashioned to match
speech rhythms. In ‘‘An Ancient Gesture,’’ most
lines have five stressed syllables, with varying
numbers of unstressed syllables. Some lines are
shorter, however, with three stresses, while one
line has six. The repetition of words and phrases
and certain rhyming end words (for instance, at
the ends of lines 2 and 9; 4, 5, and 6; 7 and 8; 11,
12, and 15; and 14 and 17) give the poem a song-
like quality, though it is irregular. At the same
time, the diction makes it sound conversational
rather than formal.Personal Lyric
The fact that Millay’s poetry was popular on the
radio and in public readings was due in large part
to its direct lyric quality. Lyric poetry is an ancient
genre, popular from classical times through the
present in almost every culture. The termlyricis
rooted in song, originally referring to words sung
to an accompanying lyre, a stringed instrument. A
lyric poem is short and musical rather than narra-
tive or dramatic, expressing emotions or thoughts.
A personal lyric represents the first-person sub-
jective experience of one speaker. The speaker
may or may not have the feelings of the poet,
but the poem is the representation of a speaking
person’s thoughts on a particular subject, for
instance, love. Millay was influenced by Renais-
sance lyrics, by the lyric poetry of Alfred Tenny-
son, John Keats, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
and by French and classical poets. Famous per-
sonal lyrics include Tennyson’s ‘‘Now Sleeps the
Crimson Petal,’’ Keats’s ‘‘On First Looking into
Chapman’s Homer,’’ and Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘‘To
Helen.’’An Ancient Gesture