The Sonnet as a Cage
Millay’s ‘I Will Put Chaos into Fourteen Lines’
In Millay's Petrarchan sonnet, the speaker resolves to tame Chaos by placing him in the cage of a sonnet, where she will be able to make an orderly being of him.
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines” consists of an octave which makes an assertion that she will place Chaos in a sonnet to make him assent to Order, and a sestet which claims that all of Chaos’ negative qualities will be gone, and then she will make him behave. Millay’s Italian or Petrarchan sonnet has the rime scheme, ABBAABBA DEDEDE.
The Octave: “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines”
In the octave, the speaker claims that she intends to place Chaos into a sonnet, and she intends to “keep him there,” and he will be able to flee only if he “be lucky.” She suspects he will try to conjure up ways of escaping; she asserts, “let him twist, and ape / Flood, fire, and demon.” But in the “strict confines” of the sonnet, those fourteen lines of steel bars, his wrestling and squirming about will “strain to nothing.” She has strong confidence that the sonnet-cage will be able to withstand the shenanigans of this Chaos.
Instead of escaping, however, he will have to submit to “sweet Order.” The speaker claims she carried him off with a religious fervor from his natural lack of stability and “amorphous shape.” And she intends to tame him by allowing him to settle into the shape of a fourteen-line sonnet. She will “hold his essence and amorphous shape, / Till he with Order mingles and combines.” She expects he will become amenable to an ordered civility under her strict training.
The Sestet: “Past are the hours, the years of our duress”
In the sestet, the speaker explains that all of the years she and her world have endured “His arrogance” are dead and gone. She will tolerated mayhem no longer in her life, because serving Chaos has been an “awful servitude.” Now she has captured him, and she describes him as actually “something simple not yet understood.” She says she will not “force him to confess.” She will not even require him to answer any questions about his arrogance and lack of order; she will simply “make him good.”
Chaos into Order
In Greek mythology, Chaos is considered the massive void out of which the earth and creation were fashioned. Therefore, chaos became the term for lack of order, because before the creation of earth and other planets there was nothing but an undifferentiated mass. Chaos is confusion, lack of order, and mayhem.
And as the speaker of Millay’s poet indicates when a life is filled with these distracting qualities, that life is serving a distressing master; therefore, the speaker has determined to eliminate chaos in her life by limiting his field of motion; she will make order in her life by limiting chaos. The discipline of placing words in fourteen lines becomes the cage used to limit and excise flabby language. The poem aspires to be lean and orderly, not flimsy and chaotic.
Other articles on Millay: Millay’s ‘Renascence’: The Drama of a Mystical Experience
