18 pages • 36-minute read
An Ancient Gesture
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Themes
The Power of Tears and Emotion
In “An Ancient Gesture,” tears are a source of power and pride. The speaker is either crying or has finished crying: “I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron,” she says in Lines 1 and 10. The tears don’t weaken the speaker, nor do they diminish her other faculties. Contrary to sexist stereotypes, she can be emotional and thoughtful at the same time. The tears yield to a meditation on another powerful, feeling woman: Penelope.
Penelope, too, comes across as a symbol of courage and determination. Her tears don’t signal fragility, or if they do exhibit vulnerability, they simply reveal her humanity and don’t automatically detract from her forcefulness. The speaker attributes Penelope’s tears to her resilience; She’s “weaving all day” (Line 3) and “undoing it all through the night” (Line 4). Thus, Penelope’s emotions reveal her power to endure. She has the strength to keep up the charade of work and wait for her husband to return. Her tolerance for pain and struggle accumulates into an explosion or “burst” of tears in Line 8.
Millay subverts the norm about crying in “An Ancient Gesture.” Expressing emotions makes a person superior. A genuine display of tears is a part of “the very best tradition (Line 12). Through the theme of tears and emotion, Millay downgrades dispassionate behavior. In Millay’s hierarchy, women who sincerely and visibly show their feelings reign at the top, and men like Ulysses can only superficially try to emulate them.
The Fluidity of Identity and the Strength of Identification
Millay’s poem plays with the theme of identity. The poem centers on two women: the speaker and Penelope. They each have separate identities and do different things. The speaker has an “I” and wipes her eyes on the corner of her apron. Penelope has a “you” and a “your,” and she weaves all day and, when night approaches, undoes the work. The two link up in their display of emotions. The speaker cries in Line 1, and by the end of Stanza 1, Penelope “burst into tears” (Line 8). The act of crying creates a bond between the speaker and Penelope. It bolsters the speaker’s sense of self. Thinking about how Penelope cried back in Ancient Greece makes the speaker feel noble about how she’s crying now. Identification with Penelope helps the speaker feel “authentic” (Line 11) and “classic” (Line 12). The similarities bring esteem and strength.
At the same time, the bond between the two women makes it hard to tell them apart. The speaker says “you” as if she’s speaking to Penelope. Yet the speaker talks to Penelope like she’s speaking about herself. She renders Penelope’s physical state with such precision that it reads like she’s talking about her own “tired” arms and “tight” neck (Line 5). The speaker then does something similar with Penelope’s mental state. She describes Penelope’s attitude about “morning” and “light” (Line 6) so succinctly that it’s like she’s delineating her own mental condition.
The closeness between Penelope and the speaker makes it hard to decipher what feelings belong to Penelope and what emotions belong to the speaker. In Stanza 1, neither of them obtains full agency because the boundaries between the speaker and Penelope inevitably blur. Then again, maybe the opacity is on purpose. It’s not a matter of agency since both women identify with crying and its power. The experience is shared, which reflects communal strength.
The Difference in Gender
Although Millay’s poem never uses terms like “women” or “men,” the poem confronts gender constructs, with Penelope and the speaker representing women and Ulysses symbolizing men. In Millay’s poem, gender is unequal. The imbalance favors women as women carry on “the very best tradition” (Line 12) with their tears. As crying is a positive in Millay’s poem, and since women’s tears are “authentic” (Line 11), women are worthy of emulation.
In Stanza 2, Ulysses tries to copy Penelope’s tears, but the speaker emphasizes that Ulysses’s tears are “only” (Line 14) an imitation. As a male, Ulysses has trouble joining the lineage begun by Penelope and maintained by the speaker. Ulysses’s male tears aren’t natural since he “learned” (Line 16) to cry from Penelope. His crying is a spectacle meant for the “assembled throng” (Line 15) and not a genuine manifestation of an organic private emotion. Ulysses’s lackluster tears indicate men aren’t as powerful as women when it comes to the “ancient gesture.”
The disparity between men and women also manifests in Ulysses’s wooden representation. The speaker doesn’t think much about his tribulations, as none of his struggles earn a mention. In a sense, the speaker marginalizes and nearly erases the one male figure in the poem, just like women have, historically, faced erasure in many narratives.
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