Windows, Vistas, and Interiors in the Sonnets of Tuckerman and Millay
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman and Edna St. Vincent Millay both address marriage in their sonnets. Tuckerman laments the death of his wife and struggles to cope with it. By contrast, in “Sonnets from an Ungrafted tree,” Millay depicts a woman in a failed marriage experiencing the last days of her husband’s life. In each case, the poet links sonnets in a thematic or narrative sequence. Millay uses the same form throughout her sequence, but Tuckerman alters his formal organization in nearly every case.
Beyond the marital theme and shared emphasis on sequence, each poet deploys window images in several sonnets. In doing so, they plumb the relation between inside and outside to gauge the interior life of each speaker. By analyzing the window patterns, one gains new insight into the psychological development of each speaker in relation to their social context.
The window is sometimes opaque, so it is a barrier as much as a link between spheres. My central research question is, what do the window images reveal about the speakers’ worlds? Drawing on Caroline Levine’s claim that form is social as well as aesthetic, I focus not only on image-patterns and sequence, but on the contrasts between Tuckerman’s male protagonist and MiIlay’s female speaker, and between Tuckerman’s era, with its emphasis on nature, and Millay’s Bohemian early twentieth century, with its emphasis on New Womanhood. I also draw on Adorno’s insight that social forms are embedded in the lifeworld of lyric, so one must read individual emotions as responses to them. Social assumptions structure public and private, exterior and interior. The personal and spiritual are defined but not determined by the political and institutional.
Beyond the marital theme and shared emphasis on sequence, each poet deploys window images in several sonnets. In doing so, they plumb the relation between inside and outside to gauge the interior life of each speaker. By analyzing the window patterns, one gains new insight into the psychological development of each speaker in relation to their social context.
The window is sometimes opaque, so it is a barrier as much as a link between spheres. My central research question is, what do the window images reveal about the speakers’ worlds? Drawing on Caroline Levine’s claim that form is social as well as aesthetic, I focus not only on image-patterns and sequence, but on the contrasts between Tuckerman’s male protagonist and MiIlay’s female speaker, and between Tuckerman’s era, with its emphasis on nature, and Millay’s Bohemian early twentieth century, with its emphasis on New Womanhood. I also draw on Adorno’s insight that social forms are embedded in the lifeworld of lyric, so one must read individual emotions as responses to them. Social assumptions structure public and private, exterior and interior. The personal and spiritual are defined but not determined by the political and institutional.
Jeff Westover is the author of The Colonial Moment: Discoveries and Settlements in Modern American Poetry. He has recently published articles about W.S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, H.D., and Thylias Moss, and he has covered criticism of American Poetry for several years for American Literary Scholarship (Duke University Press).