Conscientious Objector

“Conscientious Objector” is a free-verse poem with 13 long lines divided into four stanzas. In books like Collected Lyrics—which was originally edited by Millay herself and, after her death, by her sister Norma—a line longer than the width of the page is indicated by indenting the content spilling onto the following line. Readers unfamiliar with this poetic printing convention might overlook the indentation of half the lines and, in this way, the poem can appear to have 24 lines. Further complicating this is that some publications break Millay’s long lines, but not necessarily in the places where the lines spill over and are indented in Collected Lyrics.

The poem’s long lines do not have a consistent meter. Millay often combines two sentences in one line using semicolons or colons, such as in Lines 2, 3, 5, 8, and 12. Other long sentences use introductory elements followed by a comma, such as the lines that begin with “Though” (Lines 6 and 10). Lines 1 and 13—the first and last lines—are the shortest of the poem. Line 1 reaches, but does not spill over, the edge of the page, and Line 13 is only six syllables (four words) long.

Long lines are not a feature in many of Millay’s most famous poems. According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Millay “rejected avant-garde formal strategies of the earlier modernists and subjected poetic form to political ends” (Princeton 1489). In “Conscientious Objector,” her long lines resemble Walt Whitman’s lines rather than the avant-garde structures of poems by T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. In other works, she strictly follows poetic forms, like the sonnet.