18 pages • 36 minutes read

Lament

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1923

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Socio-Historical Context

“Lament” focuses on a mother's plight after the death of her husband, following her thought process as she tries to pick up the pieces and move forward as the head of her family. In the years leading up to when the poem was written in 1921, women were making significant progress in the fight for equality, including winning the right to vote in 1920. However, advances were not without difficulty, and a single mother would likely face significant struggles, depending on her economic status. The same year that Millay wrote “Lament,” the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act became law and marked one of the United States’s first turns into Social Security. The act provided one million dollars every year over five years for state programs that helped women and children. The law was initially introduced in 1918 by Jeannette Rankin, who was the first woman elected to Congress, serving as a Representative for Montana. Women’s groups lobbied on it, and finally Senator Morris Shepherd of Texas and Representative Horace Mann Towner of Iowa designed the law with the intent of helping develop rural facilities and lowering high mortality rates of women and children. When it passed in 1921, it was one of the first federal programs aimed at helping women and children, and it was renewed through 1929. However, it would not be until 1935 before President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would establish the Social Security Act, designed to provide aid to families that had lost an income-producing father. Not long after that, federal child labor laws were enacted in 1938 to protect children from exploitation in the workforce, which was connected in large part to the poverty families might suffer with the loss of an income-producing father. However, at the time of the poem, the mother would not have had these systems, but would have to rely on herself, perhaps her family, or private organizations for help.

Literary Context

Millay’s life and career intersects with the Modernist literary movement, which spanned from the late 19th century to around 1950. Modernism is often defined by a drive to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound famously proclaimed, and writers participating in the movement sought to break with the past and explore new forms of expression, address rapid industrialization and societal alienation, as well as social changes and advances in the sciences, and take a more objective approach while also exploring new ideas in psychology.

Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and E.E. Cummings are often thought of as the major figures in modernist poetry, but many women writers like Millay were defining the movement in equally significant ways, including Gertrude Stein, H.D., Mina Loy, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and Marianne Moore. Millay’s contribution was often social and political, addressing feminist and socialist topics, as in “Lament.” She was also known for writing political anti-war poetry, and much of her work was both subversive of social expectations and inspiring to the feminist movement of the time; for many, she represented a new kind of woman. The nature of her poetry readings also communicated that free, modernist sentiment, as she often attracted large crowds due to her riveting performances.