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_: Love is not blind. I see with single eye Your ugliness and other women’s grace. I know the imperfections of your face— The eyes too wide apart, the brow too high For beauty. Learned from earliest youth am I In loveliness, and cannot so erase Its letters from my mind, that I may trace You faultless, I must love until I die....[55] 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.