Edna St. Vincent Millay

Justice Denied In Massachusetts

'''Justice Denied In Massachusetts'''
Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,

Quack grass invasion

Quack grass is nearly impossible to eradicate—its rhizomes spread underground and breaking them creates new plants. The bent hoe blades aren't poetic exaggeration; this weed literally defeats tools.

Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot
conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.
Let us go home, and sit in the sitting room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,
Beneficent upon us
Out of the glittering bay,
And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea
Moving the blades of corn
With a peaceful sound.
Forlorn, forlorn,
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.
And the petals drop to the ground,
Leaving the tree unfruited.
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed
uprooted—
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.

Biblical echo

"We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain" inverts the pastoral promise. No green pastures, no still waters—just mud and night.

Inheritance squandered

"The splendid dead" are previous generations who cleared land and broke soil. Their legacy—subdued weeds, sweet furrows—is being actively destroyed on the speaker's watch.

What from the splendid dead
We have inherited —
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued —
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.
Let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting-room until we die;

Sitting-room refrain

The room's name becomes darkly literal by the end. They'll sit here "until we die"—the sitting-room is where you wait for death, not where you live.

At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;

Broken inheritance

They leave children a doorway (beauty, entrance to possibility) but a blighted earth and broken hoe (destroyed means of survival). Form without function.

Leaving to our children's children the beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Sacco and Vanzetti: The Cloud That Won't Lift

CONTEXT Written in 1927 after Massachusetts executed Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrant anarchists convicted of murder in a trial widely seen as rigged by anti-immigrant, anti-radical prejudice. Worldwide protests failed. Millay herself was arrested protesting outside the State House.

The cloud is this injustice, and Millay's genius is making it meteorological. It blocks the sun permanently—"Not in our day / Shall the cloud go over." This isn't weather; it's a new climate. The execution has changed the moral atmosphere of Massachusetts so fundamentally that crops won't grow. She's literalizing the idea that injustice poisons everything.

Notice she never names Sacco and Vanzetti. The poem works by displacement—channeling political rage into agricultural failure. "Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?" The question sounds rhetorical, but she answers it: no. Evil does overwhelm the larkspur and the corn. She watched them go under. This is a poem about watching beauty die and being unable to stop it, whether that beauty is two men or a garden.

The Garden as Moral Battleground

Millay uses farming vocabulary with precision. Quack grass (quack is short for "quackgrass," a corruption of "quitch") spreads through underground rhizomes—you can't kill it by pulling, and cutting it up makes it worse. When she says "we have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them," she means the tools themselves are breaking. The weeds are winning through sheer persistence.

"Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued"—this is what the previous generation left them. Cleared land. A fighting chance. But now "the slug and the mildew plunder." These aren't dramatic enemies; they're rot and decay, the patient destroyers. The garden doesn't fall to a storm—it falls to corruption from within.

The blighted earth and broken hoe they leave their children is the poem's devastating final image. Not just failure, but destroyed tools. The next generation inherits a beautiful doorway (the forms of democracy, perhaps?) but no way to work the land, no way to survive. The equipment is ruined.