[PR] We Disinfect the Crime

When we did the pretest in AP Lit at the beginning of the school year I found myself terribly distracted whilst doing my poetry analysis.  One of the poems that we were being asked to dissect caught my attention and I haven't forgotten it since.  As soon as I got home, I recalled a line from the poem and allowed Google to whisk me off into enlightenment.  The poem was an unnamed sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay, of whom my mother had heard but I had not.  Below is the sonnet in that pretest:

Read history: so learn your place in Time;

And go to sleep: all this was done before;

We do it better, fouling every shore;

We disinfect, we do not probe, the crime.

Our engines plunge into the seas, they climb

Above our atmosphere: we grow not more

Profound as we approach the ocean's floor;

Our flight is lofty, it is not sublime.

Yet long ago this Earth by struggling men

Was scuffed, was scraped by mouths that bubbled mud;

And will be so again, and yet again;

Until we trace our poison to its bud

And root, and there uproot it: until then,

Earth will be warmed each winter by man's blood.

First of all, Thomas C. Foster can suck it because this sonnet looks like the saddest square on the planet and that whole chapter was bull feces.  I see myself often tending to gravitate towards sonnets when deciding that I appreciate a poem.  They're fun to write and force a certain level of accountability with their dense structure, so it hard to find sonnets that are just lazy word vomit.

I think what stands out the most for me is Millay's word choice; "probe," "plunge," "sublime," etc.  The juxtaposition of "scuffed" and "scraped" with "bubbled mud" just gets me every time I read that line. Ugh.  I also feel like Millay is writing directly to the human soul with this poem.  She is obviously blaming humans for focusing on the wrong measures of success, but she does so with the "we" perspective (which makes it feel a bit less omnipotent because she's admitting that she's a member of the guilty party).  The line that really got me to feel that guilt was "Until we trace our poison to its bud"; With that phrase, I imagined veins swollen with poison that we haven't necessarily injected ourselves, but just kind of stare at idly as it courses through us.  The image made me feel kind of gross and she honestly got her point across.

When I mentioned the poem to other people in our class I didn't get as passionate of a response as I was anticipating, so I doubt this poem has as big of an impact on others as it does on me.  But hey, some people like Emily Dickinson.  I don't understand it, but whatever, man, you do you.