Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls

Edna St. Vincent Millay packed performance venues for readings of, most often, her sonnets, which weaved a progressive feminine sexuality with classic allusions and formal poetic meter. She did not write sonnets exclusively, but it is the form for which she is best known. Her biographical page on the Poetry Foundation states that, like fellow poet Robert Frost, “Millay was one of the most skillful writers of sonnets in the twentieth century, and… was able to combine modernist attitudes with traditional forms creating a unique American poetry.”

Her choice to write in a fixed form provided sharp contrast to the modernist free verse of contemporary poets such as Hilda Doolittle (aka, H.D.), Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein. Millay’s sonnets, while modern in their sensibility and perspective, adhered more closely to the public expectation of how poetry should sound, which is to say, rhymed and metered. Also, she constructed a kind of bridge in which the lofty or high-toned diction of the poetry of the previous century shared space with Millay’s modern wit and feminist ideals.

Though published in 1931, the poem “Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls” is part of Millay’s body of work that represents what people refer to as the Roaring Twenties, a post-war new age in which women could move more freely in the world as sexual and intellectual beings, without being defined or restricted by traditional roles.