Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls

The poem “Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls” by Edna St. Vincent Millay is an example of a Shakespearean or English sonnet consisting of 14 lines that follow a rhyming pattern of abab cdcd efef gg. Written in 1931 as part of a sonnet series within the collection Fatal Interview, the poem appears 14 years after the publication of her first collection, Renascence: and other poems (1917) and 11 years before the publication of The Murder of Lidice (1942), the last book of published poetry before her death in 1950. It is a love poem. As with many of Millay’s sonnets, the poem advocates for a kind of freedom—particularly for the speaker—within romantic love, unbound by conformity. The poem begins in the negative, stating what the speaker will not do before she shifts to let her intended suitor understand the nature of her love, gathered loosely and freely given.

Poet Biography

It would not be an exaggeration to say that more has been written about the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s life than about her poetry. In Millay’s case it is, in fact, difficult to separate the poet from the poems. Unlike contemporaries such as Wallace Stevens, who worked as an insurance executive, and William Carlos Williams, a renowned OB-GYN in addition to a famed modernist poet, Millay’s day job as a poet and writer was her sole vocation.

Millay, born in 1892, grew up in relative poverty in Maine. Her mother divorced her father in 1904, and supported the family as a travelling nurse. Cora, Millay’s mother, encouraged creativity in her children and particularly supported Millay’s artistic inclinations. In her teens, Millay won multiple writing contests with cash prizes. There was, however, no money for college. The publication of her poem, “Renascence,” garnered major attention and led to a sponsorship for her to attend Vassar, an elite women’s university. A game changer, her career at Vassar was nonetheless marked by Millay’s refusal to behave with the decorum the university deemed appropriate.

From her first collection, published in 1917, and all through the so-called Roaring Twenties, Millay’s popularity exploded, making her one of the most celebrated poets of her day. Her work embodied a sexual independence and devotion to intensity that was very much in keeping with the zeitgeist of the era, a time situated between world wars and distinguished by polarities such as Prohibition and speakeasies. Millay was a poster child for sexual freedom, female desire, and a lifestyle that valued emotional intensity and artmaking over everything, especially social convention.

From her early to midcareer, Millay was renowned for the public performance of her poetry, attracting huge audiences and selling out large venues. She married Eugen Jan Boissevain in 1923, and, true to her credo, continued to engage in affairs with both men and women throughout her life. Deeply devoted to Millay, Boissevain supported her career by attending to her precarious health as well as maintaining their upstate New York estate, Steepletop. Health issues, financial trouble, Millay’s waning popularity and a car accident diminished them both. Millay died of a heart attack in 1950 at age 58, a year after the death of her husband.

In addition to poetry, Millay wrote libretti for opera, dramatic plays, and short stories, and often wrote under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd. In 1923, Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection The Ballad of the Harp Weaver (1922). In 1943, she was awarded the Frost Medal, bestowed by the Poetry Society of America. At one time lauded by Harriet Monroe as “the greatest woman poet since Sappho,” Millay’s work was later dismissed as old-fashioned and even inept. In the late 20th century, feminist scholars took up her work once again, reviving interest in what had been a textbook meteoric career; one that blazed bright and faded early.

Poem Text

Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls.” 1931.  All Poetry.

Summary

“Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls” is a love poem in which the speaker begins by telling her lover not how she will give her love, but how she won’t. The first line echoes the title. The casket, a thing in which one buries their dead, is not the vessel of the speaker’s love. No matter how beautiful it may be, bedecked in precious gemstones, a casket is a cold thing, according to the speaker. It is not a suitable container for her love, “(l)ocked, and the key withheld” (Line 3) as “other girls” (Line 3) might offer their affections. Her love is not wrought or overworked, like a rope or a “ring” (Line 5), things that are manmade and built to hold or bind something tight. Trouble begins, the speaker suggests, in these constructed promises of fidelity. On the other hand, the speaker endorses a love that is given and received freely, with no agenda, hidden or otherwise. The speaker illustrates her commitment to what she considers a more organic and spontaneous type of love by comparing her generosity to the gathering of flowers from the field or fruit from the orchard, fresh and loosely held, offered with innocence and enthusiasm, as a child might.