"I will put Chaos into 14 lines"

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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 itself. This is a Petrarchan sonnet and follows the typical structure for this form. There is an octave, sestet and there is a rhyming scheme. The octave follows the typical rhyming scheme of ABBAABBA. The rhyme scheme in the sestet is CDCDCD and is a variation to the typical rhyme scheme. “What lips my lips have kissed, and where and why” is another Millay sonnet that follows the Petrarchan form and again has the slight variation in rhyming scheme which is CDEDCE in the sestet. The octave forms the question and the goal of the sonnet while the sestet addresses the question and attempts to resolve or comment on it. The overall structure of the sonnet can be quite rigid in the point of view of the poet who has to create based on these restrictions. The poet has to come up with a question and resolution. Poets also have to come up with words that follow a particular rhyme scheme. Creating a sonnet can seem like a difficult task. This is what Millay is struggling with in the beginning of I will put Chaos into 14 lines”.

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I will put Chaos into 14 lines” can be called a sonnet based on the criteria above. The octave sets the goal of the sonnet, and the particular goal of this sonnet is to “put Chaos into 14 lines” (1). That is what the writer does in the octave. He escapes and “flood, fire, and demon” (4) are released in the next line. Chaos is finally caught “in the strict confines/ Of this sweet order” (5-6). At the end of the octave Chaos “mingles and combines” with the order.

Now that the goal of the octave has been set up, ...

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