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Edna St. Vincent MillayA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Millay weaves imagery throughout her poem, “Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls” that, directly or indirectly, indicates two states of being—that of being shut tight and inaccessible, and that of remaining loose and open and available. While a burial casket may be open for viewing before it is lowered into the ground, its ultimate purpose is to enclose—entomb—a body, and not a living body, but a dead one. The coffin transforms, then, into a sort of hope chest that is devoid of hope, as it is “(l)ocked and the key withheld” (Line 3). If it is a hope chest, it is a receptacle for the trousseau, or the linens and clothing a bride collects prior to and in anticipation of her marriage. This closed casket/hope chest is a strong metaphor for a woman’s virginity, something a girl of the day was encouraged to safeguard until marriage, as proof of her moral worthiness. The speaker in this poem will not withhold her love “in a lovers’-knot” (Line 5), a thing pulled tight, nor “in a ring” (Line 5), which encloses. Instead, she will offer herself “in the open hand” (Line 9), “unhidden” (Line 10).
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
An Ancient Gesture
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Conscientious Objector
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Ebb
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I Will Put Chaos Into Fourteen Lines
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Lament
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Song of a Second April
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Spring
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Courage That My Mother Had
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Spring And The Fall
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Travel
Edna St. Vincent Millay