In ‘‘An Ancient Gesture,’’ the speaker comes
in directly only in the first line of each stanza. The
rest of the poem develops the parallels of Pene-
lope and Ulysses as extended metaphors from
which to draw inferences about the speaker’s feel-
ings. The reader does not get an objective allusion
to the story of Penelope; it is obviously filtered
through the speaker’s perspective. She uses her
own instance of crying into her apron to interpret
the Greek story, and conversely, we must use this
interpretation of Penelope to guess the speaker’s
situation and how she feels about it. It is merely
suggested by the first stanza that the speaker may
be a modern housewife overcome with grief for
an absent husband or lover. The second stanza
suggests that the speaker’s partner may not be
completely sincere in the relationship.
Historical Context
Vassar College
Caroline Dow, head of the National Training
School at the YWCA in New York City, heard
Millay recite the poem ‘‘Renascence’’ in 1912. She
consequently encouraged Millay to apply for a
scholarship to Vassar College and helped her
with expenses. Though poor among wealthy stu-
dents at Vassar, Millay held her own as a social
leader as bolstered by the artistic fame that pre-
ceded her. She attended Vassar from 1913 to
1917, when it was a prestigious women’s college,
an elite institution that rigorously trained wealthy
young women in the liberal arts. It was an edu-
cation equal to that of the best men’s colleges at a
time when most women’s colleges had been
founded as seminaries for teachers. At Vassar,
Millay got the intellectual training she longed
for, preparing her for her vocation as a poet
and allowing her to meet many of the leading
male poets and intellectuals of the day.
Millay was independent and popular at Vas-
sar, writing and acting in her own plays, such as
‘‘The Princess Marries the Page’’ (1917), and win-
ning prizes for her poetry. She was a triumph in a
Vassar pageant celebrating women’s intellectual
progress in dressing as the French poet Marie de
France, prophetic of her own career as a love
poet. It was from her Vassar education, which
included study of the sonnets of the Renaissance
writers and French lyric poets, that Millay’s love
of classical literature became a lifelong pursuit.
These were important formative influences, as
was the moral emphasis that Vassar women
develop a social conscience. In turn, Millay’s act-
ing at Vassar set the stage for her later participa-
tion in the Provincetown Players and her career
as a playwright. In 1921, for Vassar’s sixtieth
anniversary, she wrote the play ‘‘The Lamp and
the Bell,’’ celebrating female friendships. It was at
Vassar that she began referring to herself as Sap-
pho, after the famous classical lyricist.Greenwich Village, 1917–1920
After college, Millay liveda bohemian life in Green-
wich Village, in New York City. The village was
bounded by Washington Square and nearby New
York University, and it was filled with both college
graduates and Italian immigrants.Therewerepar-
ties every night, with artists and intelligentsia speak-
ing furiously about art and politics. The villagers
were largely liberals and avant-garde artists who
had rejected their middle-class backgrounds.
MacDougal Street housed the Liberal Club
and Provincetown Playhouse, and Millay was a
member of both. At the Liberal Club, she met
Floyd Dell, the editor of the leftist magazine called
theMasses. Other members of the club were John
Reed, Eugene O’Neill, and Susan Glaspell. Dell
introduced Millay to radical ideologies such as
socialism and pacifism. He also tried to interest
her in Freud and psychoanalysis, but she rejected
Freud. Her playAria da Capo(1919), which she
directed and acted in with the Provincetown Play-
ers, highlights a theme of the futility of war that
she learned from her liberal friends. Millay was
also exposed to the painting of John Sloan, of the
Ash Can School, depicting street people. Her
poem ‘‘MacDougal Street’’ similarly praises the
local Italian street culture. She had begun to lose
her Christian faith at Vassar, and in the village she
learned a universal love of humanity, which
became her personal faith.
In the village, the poets argued over tradi-
tional poetic forms versus the new experimental
techniques of imagism and free verse used by Ezra
Pound and T. S. Eliot. Two of Millay’s lifelong
friends, Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Byn-
ner, were poets who, like Millay, looked to tradi-
tion for inspiration. They wrote sonnets and used
rhyme and were against the program of the imag-
ists. For this loyalty to the past, Millay was
severely criticized by modernist poets and critics.
Millay counted herself as a new woman and a
feminist, having met and admired such feminists as
Inez Milholland, her later husband’s first wife.
Fidelity was not expected, and she embraced aAn Ancient Gesture