TO STEEPLETOP WITH EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY 189nesting on the ground, and rejoiced at a Bohemian waxwing, “Oh, at last I have
seen one! (Seen two!)”
Near Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the winter of 1926, a western bird triggered
something new in Millay. The Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Painted Desert,
and Enchanted Mesa charmed her, and an Indian dance at Zuni pueblo. But what
spurred a poem, “Pueblo Pot,” was a “red-shafted flicker and his bride”—“two
Navajos enchanted,” she calls them. They appeared on a housetop,
flashing the wonder of their underwings;
There stood, mysterious and harsh and sleek,
Wrenching the indigo berry from the shedding woodbine with strong
ebony beak.Condors and hawks in Jeffers’s poems had recently astonished East Coast read-
ers, and later when Millay visited him, “She questioned me about the local
hawks.” In “Pueblo Pot” her rangy lines take after him (and D. H. Lawrence,
with his New Mexico eagle ’s “heavy black beak”). She kindles to a new bird.
While the eastern flicker is a yellow-shafted race, the western, her first spotting,
is red-shafted—“the wonder of their underwings.”
A rapture heats this December desert scene and her own style too.
The black new moon was crescent on the breast of each;
From the bodies of both a visible heat beat down,
And from the motion of their necks a shadow would fly and fall,
Skimming the court and in the yellow adobe wall
Cleaving a blue breach.
Powerful was the beauty of these birds.
It boomed like a struck bell in the silence deep and hot.
No such charge emanates from birds Millay prized at Steepletop—bobolink,
waxwing, cuckoo, and scores of others. These flickers,
The scarlet shaft on the grey cheek,
The purple berry in the ebony beak,met some craving in her, “the fierce light of the birds” akin to her own ardor.
As for the bond with Jeffers, what made it work? “I don’t live near the sea,”
Millay told him, as his rocky home recalled her youth on the Maine coast, its
“Tons of water striking the shore.” “The beach where you went swimming,” he
wrote after her first visit, “is piled with stormy brown sea-weed.” Jeffers called
Millay “the once-a-century poet” who could manage “flamelike & powerful &
very sweet” sonnets. She kept a picture of him on her desk.
Meanwhile political events roused her temper. The Massachusetts case of
Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchist immigrants falsely accused of murder, came to a
boil with their death sentence in 1927. Millay demonstrated wearing a placard,