I Will Put Chaos Into Fourteen Lines

Readers of Millay’s poem become aware of the speaker in the very first line. The speaker is a first-person entity, as indicated by the first-person pronoun “I” (Line 1). The ungendered speaker relates what they “will” (Line 1) do, meaning it hasn’t been done yet and that the speaker is projecting their future intentions. The speaker wants to relegate “Chaos” into “fourteen lines” (Line 1). “Chaos” refers to “a state of utter confusion,” “a confused mass or mixture,” “a state of things in which chance is supreme,” and “the inherent unpredictability in the behavior of a complex natural system” (“Chaos.” Merriam-Webster, 2022). In addition to this contemporary understanding of chaos as a state of bewilderment and disorder, Greek mythology also viewed “Chaos” (Line 1) as “either the primeval emptiness of the universe before things came into being or the abyss of Tartarus, the underworld” (“Chaos.” Britannica, 2022). Since the reference to “Chaos” is capitalized in the first line of the poem as it is in Greek mythology, readers may assume that the meaning of “Chaos” the speaker intends is closer to this mythological allusion to primordial nothingness or a hellish pit.