"I will put Chaos into 14 lines"

The first 200 words of this essay...

Edna St. Vincent Millay's "I will put Chaos into 14 lines" sonnet is very vague on the surface. If you dig deeper, there could be a variety of interpretations. One interpretation is that this sonnet could be about a man. 'Him' is referred to constantly throughout the sonnet. If you go with that theory, then the sonnet would be about a relationship with the man who seems chaotic to the narrator. The 'I' is trying desperately to make some sense of 'him'. Her goal is to 'make him good' (14). That is only one possible argument, which could be argued, based on textual clues. The more likely interpretation is that this sonnet is about writing a sonnet. What helps lead the reader to that conclusion is evidence from the first line: "I will put Chaos into fourteen lines" (1). 'Fourteen lines' is typically the length of a sonnet, and this particular sonnet is 14 lines. Now that we know what this particular sonnet is about, what does Millay have to say about writing sonnets and how does she say it? These questions will be explored in this paper.

The first step is to look at the sonnet structure