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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 draws upon traditional symbolism of death, characterizes death as human, and associates untimely death with war. Death as a figure on horseback appears in many different works of art and literature. For instance, the Bible includes death riding a pale horse; he is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in the book of Revelations. Pre-Christian Irish mythology includes the Dullahan—the headless horseman—as an embodiment of the god Crom. Millay turns these looming supernatural figures into a man who has to take his horse “out of the stall” with a “clatter on the barn-floor” (Line 2). This evacuates some of the mystique of death, casting him as a more humanlike figure.
Death maintains some of his imposing presence in Millay’s poem. He is a threatening figure: He whips the speaker and places a hoof on their breast. Still, a human could perform these violent acts. Millay’s characterization of death is unlike the horseman who carries his own head or the horseman as a skeletal, inhuman figure. She uses language associated with war to characterize death as a war criminal. Death seeks locations, maps, spies, passwords, and plans. The combination of humanizing death, such as describing him as someone who could use a “leg up” (Line 5) to mount his horse, and describing him with martial, or war-related,
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