The experience described here obviously involved another woman, and remained unconsummated. Like Hille and Rilke, the poet feels such love to be potentially the most perfect in the world; but, unlike them, she sees perfection only in completion, not in abstinence. Furthermore, the last two quoted lines have a kind of classroom echo, as of discipline by some harsher agent than the deity of “God’s World.”

When Millay submitted this poem along with “Renascence” for inclusion in The Lyric Year she herself so much preferred “Interim” that she ventured to plead by mail for its inclusion.[54] As it is inferior to “Renascence” in both profundity and restraint, her preference argues that it had been written too recently for her to gain perspective upon it. She was twenty at the time, three years out of high school, and living in a small Maine town of rather limited intellectual and personal opportunities, according to her sister Kathleen’s later picture of it in Against the Wall. It is also clear from all her poetry and her correspondence that hers was a highly emotional temperament. All this suggests that for a considerable time in her late teens Millay was completely absorbed in a passionate variant attachment, which then suffered some abrupt termination. Out of her grief grew “Interim” and a number of other laments which trickled into print throughout the next two or three years. Examination of her first published volume (Renascence, 1917) shows that save for “God’s World” and “Afternoon on a Hill,” the whole collection sounds a note of personal loss and melancholy.

During her years at Vassar (1913-1917, her twenty-first to twenty-fifth) she admitted an attachment to another fair delicate girl, at least to the extent of her own “Memorial to D.C. (Vassar College, 1918),” which appeared in the volume Second April. Death actually terminated this friendship, but the group of “little elegies” assembled under the title above are merely slight and graceful by comparison with “Interim” and its aftermaths. It is probable that certain later laments, such as “Song of a Second April” and “To One Who Might Have Borne a Message,” were truer expressions of this later loss. A third woman is pictured in a sonnet in The Harp Weaver:

This is less passionate than many of her love lyrics, and it alone among them speaks of lifelong constancy. It might have been written to the poet’s mother, to whom, as her letters testify, she was ardently devoted.

That variant emotion was at least an intermittent preoccupation with Millay until she was thirty is evident from examination of her total work before 1923, the year of her marriage. There are a number of sonnets and other verses in which the sex of the subject is uncertain, if not deliberately concealed, but which do not have the tone of those specifically written to men. Then there is her poetic drama, The Lamp and The Bell, written during a sojourn in Paris soon after graduation from Vassar, and presented at the college in 1921. Its theme is an undying devotion between two young women, and Elizabeth Atkins’s description of it is so delightful that it must be borrowed:

Friendship, however, is much too cool a description for the love between the princesses. The relation is passionate, though as always in her variant verse Millay avoids any implication of physical intimacy.

By the time that this drama was written, however, Millay also had published a number of lyrics of heterosexual inspiration. Indeed, among the conventionally minded she had gained a quite shocking reputation on the strength of them, for they antedated the now notorious Twenties. Many of them are flippant or bitter in comparison to those inspired by women, and they flaunt inconstancy and promiscuity. See for instance the sonnets “Oh think not I am faithful to a vow,” “I shall forget you presently, my dear,”[57] “What lips my lips have kissed ... I have forgotten,” and “I being born a woman....”[58] In short, these betray conscious striving toward a masculine sexual standard to match that of her partners. They remind one that “Vincent” had concealed her sex at the date of her first publication. A critic, citing in an adult review the “phenomenal” quality of a St. Nicholas entry Millay wrote at fourteen, confessed uncertainty whether the poem was written by a boy or a girl.[59] Fellow poets reading “Renascence” thought it a man’s work, and a Barnard professor during her brief months there (repairing entrance requirement deficiencies for Vassar) pronounced “Interim” to be written in the character of a man.[60] The same viewpoint marks her libretto for Deems Taylor’s opera, The King’s Henchman.

After her marriage in 1923 all of Millay’s published verse was marked by greater emotional reticence, and if she wrote privately anything comparable to her earlier variant lyrics the chances are against its ever being made public. (There has been no providential Reinach to salvage her reliques for posterity, and it is rumored that censorship is being exercised. Letters have been admitted to the published volume of her correspondence which imply some early heterosexual indiscretion, while all variant traces have been eradicated save a proper name or two[61] in connection with which the published implications are unrevealing. To the student of variance, however, they are significant.) The one notable exception to this general reticence is Fatal Interview (1930), of which Atkins said in 1936 that she, herself,

The experience did not occur very close to the date of the volume’s publication, however, for many readers will remember individual sonnets coming out in this or that magazine over a considerable number of years, and not in the order in which they finally stand. The majority might, as far as verbal evidence goes, have been written to a person of either sex, and they differ so sharply among themselves that even allowing for the poet’s mercurial temperament and the gamut of emotion she wished to record, one sometimes feels they cannot all have been inspired by the same individual. It may be brash to suggest that they could have grown out of more than one experience, and that the fifty-two were merely assembled into one matchless tracing of the birth, growth and decline of human passion. But one of them, numbered XXI, demands special attention:

This verse was originally written either to a woman and fitted later into the artistic pattern of the whole, or the man who inspired it could appear (without incongruity in the dreamer’s mind) to have lost a masquer’s accessories—pink camellia-bud and silver comb—which are scarcely masculine. Was he one whom a woman’s costume would have become? Did the dreamer at times secretly wish him a woman? Or was this sonnet (and just possibly others in the sequence also) written specifically to a woman?

It has been the critical fashion for some time to discount Millay’s literary importance because of the sharp decline in the quality of her work after The Buck in the Snow. Her “Epitaph for the Race of Man” in that volume may be seen almost as her own poetic abdication. An artist whose gods were Life and Beauty and whose devil was Cruelty may well have found herself paralyzed by the horror of global and total war. If one predicates also the burden of a dual emotional nature, one half of which was in later years censored by the other—for no mature modern of her intelligence would lightly court the charge of arrested adolescence, no daughter of New England would willingly display what her generation considered emotional deformity—one has supplementary explanation of her creative paralysis.

* * *

Not all of this country’s variant poetry has been written by women; at least two men have contributed narrative verse. Edgar Lee Masters’s Domesday Book (1929) follows Browning’s Ring and the Book in that it begins with a girl’s death and traces the history which led up to it, through the memories of far more than Browning’s dozen persons. In the end Elenor Murray is seen as a woman too passionate and open-hearted to live peacefully or to end her days in happiness. Within a decade she gave herself lavishly to several men but was self-defeating in her very generosity, and finally ended her life because her efforts to meet her lovers’ need only brought suffering to others as well as herself.

One of the earlier reminiscences in the book comes from Alma Bell, a high-school teacher who knew Elenor at seventeen and loved her deeply. Recognizing the dangers ahead for one so susceptible to passion, she attempted to help the girl “to ripen to a rich maturity” unscathed. She had success in warding off certain unsavory male advances, but not in avoiding emotional involvement herself, since, as she observes, few persons are wholly either masculine or feminine in spirit.

Despite this conscientious restraint the town became aware of the intimacy, and Alma Bell was forced to resign her position and leave

The exceptional small town coroner, tolerant and philosophical, who elicits the stories which compose the pattern, is an evident mouthpiece for the poet himself. His final estimate of the girl’s character is one of human dignity and largeness of spirit surpassing that of her calumniators and even her lovers and friends. But the early suspicion of lesbianism cast one of the shadows which reached beyond the limits of her little Midwestern community and augmented the difficulties of her later life.

The single protesting voice in American poetry is that of George Stirling, whose Strange Waters is a brief narrative related to the work of Robinson Jeffers in both its Pacific coast setting and in grimness of theme. To a childless, but quite happy, poet and his Irish wife are sent the latter’s eighteen-year-old twin nieces. They are the children of her much older brother, to whom she has alluded only once during her married life proclaiming him a monster. His deathbed letter implies some ironic justice in their being left to her. They are fiery-haired beauties, abnormally reticent except with one another, and their mutual devotion is marked. The more boyish twin exhibits a brilliant intellect which fascinates the poet, but he intuitively senses something amiss, and listens at the door of the bedroom where they sleep together. To his horror he hears evidence of active lesbianism, and in the morning he accuses them openly. Refusing to answer him, the two set out for their usual day-long roaming on cliffs and shore. However, they do not return. When their bodies are washed in from the Pacific, one proves to be a boy. The subtle implication is that they are the incestuous offspring of the poet’s wife and her brother. Their relation, then, is not variant, but it gives Stirling opportunity to pass upon lesbianism a judgment quite as black as upon incest, for which in this case a hereditary etiology is implied.

* * *

From England the variant contribution is even thinner and more evasive than from America. Richard Aldington’s Loves of Myrrhine and Konallis (1926) is yet another derivative from Louÿs’s Songs of Bilitis. Its pair are the young goat-girl, Konallis, and the prosperous courtesan, Myrrhine, who bids her maid close her doors to male lovers, “for this is a sharper love.”[65] The tenuous drama progresses through white nights, bacchic revels, momentary unfaithfulness, and philosophic communing, and ends with Myrrhine’s death and Konallis’s subsequent marriage. Though graced with felicitous phrasing and vivid evocation of passionate mood, it is the weakest of the echoes from Louÿs’s original because the least direct in presentation of its theme.

Victoria Sackville-West’s King’s Daughter (1930) is very different but even more cryptic. Its echoes are wholly English and recall the Elizabethan lyrists from one of whom the poet is descended. The scant two-dozen pages, full of country images sharp and delicate as frost, conjure up the spirit—seldom the physical presence—of an elusive coquette and of the proud speaker, who

will commit neither pleas nor actions to paper. One early line disclaims intimacy: “How shall I haunt her separate sleep?” The only others nearly as explicit are:

It is not until reaching the final poem, “Envoi,” that the poet indicates that anything has actually occurred outside of her haunted imagination.

Here, for a moment, is the flavor of Millay, but not the intensity, and to give evidence that the whole volume breathes subjective passion one would need to quote it entirely, which is scarcely practicable. The most vivid of the poems is also one of the best known:

A negative note, barely audible, is sounded in the Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield, published by her husband, Middleton Murry, in 1940, a dozen years after her death. The poem is dated 1919, and entitled “Friendship.”

Obviously Mansfield, unlike Millay, did not see perfection in the fulfillment of variant love. Or at least not in this particular fulfillment. Passages scattered through the Scrapbook and the more reticent Journal (1928) reveal a compulsive and abject devotion in the lifelong friend alluded to in the poem above. (See, for example, “Toothache Sunday” in the Scrapbook.) The intensity of her friend’s emotion troubled Mansfield, who sometimes felt herself “a callous brute” to be unable to return it in kind or to make its possessor happy. “I don’t know why I always shrink ever so faintly from her touch. I could not kiss her lips.”[71] But, however innocent of expression, the relationship was a problem she could never discuss with her husband, and she felt that it cast a permanent, if faint, shadow between her and “J.” (Murry).

(From the recent sympathetic biography of Mansfield by her fellow New Zealander, Antony Alpers, several supplementary impressions emerge: 1) Ida Baker (“L.M.”) was never abject, but rather a dedicated priestess most happy to be elected and given a direction in life. 2) It was not her shadow which fell between Mansfield and Murry so much as the former’s compulsion to write. Katherine repeatedly blamed Murry’s self-absorption for the difficulties in their relations (Nelia Gardner White takes the same view in her novelized biography Daughter of Time, 1941) but surely her own was quite as marked. 3) While she was in Queen’s College, London, between fourteen and seventeen, there seems to have been some talk of her “unwholesome” friendships. Alpers uses the plural, but discusses only her domination of Ida Baker, unless her wooing of her feminine cousin Sidney Payne for a couple of years was also suspect. According to Alpers this courtship proceeded largely by letter, one of which he quotes to refute the charge. 4) From the picture of her two unhappy marriages (the first almost farcical) and her obviously ambivalent feeling for Ida Baker, it seems that she was a person unable to give herself completely to either man or woman. Was this because of her obsession with writing, or was that relentless creative urge the result rather than the cause of some deeper emotional block?)

The most notable feature of all these twentieth century lyrics is the women’s relatively articulate confession of variant interests. Before 1900 only “Michael Field” and Matilda Betham-Edwards (to be mentioned later) admitted inclination toward their own sex. Now the Catholic O’Neill, the New England Lowell and Millay, the British Sackville-West reveal it without apology. Schwabe and Madeleine offer their testimony still more openly, and Barney and Vivien, with the independence of expatriates and women of fortune able to create their own milieu, proclaim it not only in writing but in their lives. Indeed Vivien at least promises in any long view of western literature to figure as a minor Sappho, the greater part of her work dedicated to this limited but seemingly imperishable theme.