Analysis+1

**__Analysis #1__**
Tanya Denisova

The poem "Hearing your words, and not a word among them" by Edna St. Vincent Millay is quite obviously a romantic poem. It has the structure of an Elizabethan sonnet (with iambic pentameter and a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) and refers to a relationship several times. There can be, however, many different interpretations as to what kind of relationship the poem speaks of. The way I see it, a man is leaving a woman who is in love with him and doesn't want to hear him say the words that would cement the breakup.

The overall tone of the poem seems to be rather sorrowful, at least in the beginning and middle. It mentions a salty day, the sea, tides, and storms. It refers to men going away and women looking after them. Then, at the end, the tone turns more hopeful and perhaps even a bit resentful. First, it mentions dahlia tubers - the buds of flowers, symbolic for starting anew, beginning again, getting a second chance. Then, it says, "The wind of their endurance, driving south, / Flattened your words against your speaking mouth." To me, this last couplet sounds fairly resentful, if not angry. It seems the woman is demanding how the man could do this to her after all she had endured (though what exactly that entails is not clear).

The beginning of the poem starts out: "Hearing your words, and not a word among them / Tuned to my liking, on a salty day." The first line, in accordance with the title, tells the reader that some listener in the poem is listening to a certain speaker. The next line proceeds to inform the reader of the poem that the listener likes not a single word out all those that the speaker is saying. "A salty day" adds a touch of bitterness to the fact.

The next two lines, "When inland woods were pushed by winds that flung them / Hissing to leeward like a ton of spray," seem to compare the first two lines to a tide, preceding what sounds like the beginning of a hurricane ("pushed by winds that flung them"), intruding to the beginning of the woods that start at the seashore. Now, with these two lines introduced, "a salty day" makes more sense. Not only does it add bitterness to the exchange happening between two people, it is also part of the comparison to the sea.

The next four lines seem to go together quite well: "I thought how off Matinicus the tide / Came pounding in, came running through the Gut, / While from the Rock the warning whistle cried, / And children whimpered, and the doors blew shut." These lines refer to a specific place: Matinicus Rock, a small island off the coast of Maine, whose main feature is the Matinicus Rock Lighthouse. It seems to speak of a coming storm. The tide comes in quickly, the warning whistle blowing to warn people of the storm. The children, obviously, would be afraid if a hurricane was coming. Doors would close, people would go to their homes. It seems that the storm is brought up in the poem in order to indicate loss and a violent and sudden, though perhaps not completely surprising, disturbance in the previous peace.

The next lines go thus: "There in the autumn when the men go forth, / With slapping skirts the island women stand / In gardens stripped and scattered, peering north." The comparison I see here is simple; the men go (whether to war or to prepare for a storm or some other more manly occupation) and the women watch them, wondering if they would ever see them again. In the relationship this poem seems to speak of, the man is leaving her and she is watching him go, unable to do a thing. However, the next line of the poem is "With dahlia tubers dripping from the hand." This line seems to symbolize starting over, even though she was left with virtually nothing ("In gardens stripped and scattered"), since dahlia tubers are the bulbs of a flower which is meant to be planted in the ground so it can grow and eventually blossom again.

The last two lines, the couplet, of the poem, are this: "The wind of their endurance, driving south / Flattened your words against your speaking mouth." This seems to say that the woman felt that, after all she had endured, all she had put up with, she deserved not to have to listen to the man say his farewell. This could even be extended to say that she felt she deserved to not have a breakup, but that is, admittedly, stretching it slightly.

There is a reason that Millay incorporated Matinicus Rock into the poem. There is a legend, possibly one she grew up with, of a young woman named Abbie Burgess. According to the legend, the young Burgess maintained the Lighthouse on Matinicus Rock for several weeks while her father was on the mainland, detained by storms, and her mother was sick. The significance I see of this legend and the mention of Matinicus Rock in the poem is that Millay compares the woman in the poem to Abbie Burgess, basically saying that their troubles were not so different and each woman was put into a bad position, saddled with a problem they did not wish to have. Millay also points out that both women endured much and deserved better.