188 PA RT T W O
And children whimpered, and the doors blew shut;
There in the autumn when the men go forth,
With slapping skirts the island women stand
In gardens stripped and scattered, peering north,
With dahlia tubers dripping from the hand:
The wind of their endurance, driving south,
Flattened your words against your speaking mouth.Romance frames but barely contains a maritime saga. Once her opening rakes
the air clean, line two gives way to a throbbing island seascape, a Maine way of
marine life, women’s life, lasting till the end.
Millay’s lines course so strongly, we hardly notice their deft turns: “a salty
day” for the salt of skepticism, and “like a ton of spray,” as figures of speech
carry the Atlantic northeaster into inland woods. No misused lover but some-
one rooted in one place is calling up its roughened ways. Matinicus Island
lies twenty-five miles off Camden. Maybe the violent sea and hard fishing life
reflect her youth—strapped, no father at home, a game mother. Before the
word occurs, we sense “their endurance” obliquely in the women’s “slapping”
skirts, their gardens “stripped and scattered” as they “stand,” planted against
the wind.
An island starkness stretches Millay’s poetics. Coastal rhythms rhyming
locally (“through the Gut” / “doors blew shut,” “men go forth” / “peering
north”), wavelike cadences, local lingo toughened by long use, all drive a single
sentence. She moves from the present (“a salty day”) to the past (a “whistle
cried”) and on into a perennial present (the “women stand”). And throughout,
ongoing verbs animate an old weather-centered story: “Hissing... pounding
... running... warning... slapping... peering... dripping... driving.” Set
between “Hearing your words” and “your speaking mouth,” a drama of place
and people offsets romance with survival—getting the news from poems, as
William Carlos Williams put it.
By 1923 Millay really had burned her candle at both ends, as turbulent affairs
vied with illness, drinking, nervous breakdown. Still, she won a Pulitzer Prize
that year, the first woman poet to do so, and married a fine Dutchman, Eugen
Boissevain, widower of an American suffragist she ’d admired in college. The
couple bought a dilapidated dairy farm on seven hundred hilly acres in upstate
New York and named it Steepletop, after a local wildflower, the steeplebush (or
queen-of-the-meadow). They set about renovating the house, discovering a
second brook, keeping birdfeeders full, cultivating fruits and herbs and vege-
tables, crating huckleberries for sale, picking “overwhelming blueberries” and
“heavily bearing pear trees,” snowshoeing miles for the mail. Millay’s knowl-
edge of flowers expanded, and of birds. One summer she noted fourteen species