White sky, over the hemlocks bowed with snow,
Saw you not at the beginning of evening the antlered buck and his doe
Millay chooses an unusual grammatical structure for these opening lines of the poem. The first line appears initially to be merely a description of the landscape, while the beginning of line two reveals instead that it is a question addressed to the sky. However, the syntax obscures the identity of the addressee by inserting words between "white sky" and "saw you not." This makes it difficult to tease out the true subject of the sentence, so that readers will likely think, at least at first, that the speaker's question is addressed to them. This draws the reader in without explicitly including them in the work.
Over the stone-wall into the wood of hemlocks bowed with snow.
This line exemplifies many of the sound elements that make the poem sound mournful and mysterious: repeated long O vowels and other low vowel sounds, like "Ah" and "OO," as well as consonants like W, S, L, and H. Meanwhile, the image of the deer traversing the orchard wall to run into the snowy woods exemplifies their elusive wildness. Whereas the orchard represents a comfortably human, domestic world, the woods represent the unknown animal realm. The orchard wall is the boundary between these two worlds—one the deer are able to freely cross over.
How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers
This is the first line in the poem that does not end with a long O sound. Its dramatic divergence from the rhyme scheme is jarring, reflecting the jarring sight of the buck lying dead. Interestingly, it is this line—rather than the previous one describing the blood of the buck—that differs from the others in terms of rhyme. For the speaker, it appears to be not so much the sight of violence and death itself that is shocking. Rather, it is meditating on the forcefulness and strangeness of death, as the speaker does in this line, that prompts the strong reaction reflected in the rhyme scheme.
