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: Gone in good sooth you are: not even in dream You come. As if the strictures of the light, Laid on our glances to their disesteem, Extended even to shadows and the night; Extended even beyond that drowsy sill Along whose galleries, open to the skies All maskers move unchallenged and at will, Visor in hand and hooded to the eyes. To that pavilion the green sea in flood Curves in, and the slow dancers dance in foam; I find again the pink camellia-bud On the wide step, beside a silver comb— But it is scentless; up the marble stair I mount with pain, knowing you are not there. 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. * * * * *