The Velvet Arras

Huntsman, What Quarry? By Edna St. Vincent Millay. Harper. $2.00

Edna Millay’s most recent volume gives us another handful of the troubadour lyrics with which we have generally associated her talents. Her natural talent, for she has always been of the line of Blondel, and the lyrical ease that accompanies her writing in poems like “The Ballad of Chaldon Down,” “The Rabbit,” “To a Calvinist in Bali,” “Huntsman, What Quarry?” and Part viii of “Theme and Variations,” are quite her own. This is much better than when at the bidding or the heckling of critics she has attempted metaphysics, or political presentations mildly interesting, but no more illuminating or thematic than a crossword puzzle. As many humble tales and saws attest, there is no strain like the strain of being forced out of one’s bent, and this strain seems evident in Miss Millay’s Conversations at Midnight, and in Fatal Interview, where the forcing is not only toward metaphysics, but into a love-attitude one cannot find natural to Millay—the “less than the dust beneath thy chariot wheel’’ motif, more probable in Wylie, and perhaps transferred under her influence to deepen the sense of languishment and despair in the sonnet tone. But the artifice, if artifice, is an oversight too, for it is quite unsuitable to the independence and briskness of the English form employed in the Fatal Interview sequence. Beyond such forcings and affectations as these, and a few tricks more charming than reprehensible, Millay’s only offense has been the usual offense of the troubadours—a fondness for the courts, and a dwelling too long behind the velvet arras.