Summary
The speaker addresses the sky, describing it as part of a wintry landscape of snow-covered trees. She asks the sky whether it has seen two deer, a male and a female, standing in an orchard. In fact, the speaker says, she herself (or he—the speaker's gender isn't stated) saw them. The deer ran away out of the orchard and into the woods. Now, the buck lies dead with his blood staining the snow.
Analysis
The syntax of the poem's early lines is knotty and complex, making it initially difficult to understand that the speaker is questioning the sky rather than the reader or another addressee. Moreover, inverted phrasing like "saw you not at the beginning of evening" makes the poem's literal meaning even harder to parse. This grammatical complexity has the effect of slowing the poem down, toning down urgency and inducing a mood of tranquility and stillness that mimics the stillness of the poem's rural setting. At the close of this long, tangled first sentence the poem shifts into a choppier rhythm, as the speaker asserts "I saw them." This phrase, repeated in the following sentence, is more straightforward not only in its meter but also in its declarative grammar. With these words, the poem is enlivened, its stillness morphing into movement just in time for the speaker's description of the running, moving deer.
Moreover, as the poem continues and the death of the buck is revealed, this repetition of "I saw them" takes on new poignancy. The speaker's statement seems like a reassurance or insistence, perhaps in the face of disbelief, that she has truly seen the deer. Despite the fact that the buck is now dead, and despite the undeniably visceral evidence of his death (the vividly described "wild blood scalding the snow"), the speaker defends the reality—even if it is now gone, and even if she is the sole witness—of the deer's life. One of the poem's thematic interests is the closeness between life and death, and the sometimes surreal way that they coexist. For the speaker, remembering the living buck, and mentally juxtaposing it with the image of death in front of her, is one way to get a grasp on the suddenness of this transition.
An especially notable aspect of this work is the way Millay deals with rhyme. Each of these first six lines ends with the same vowel sound, a long "O." Moreover, most of the lines end with the same word, "snow." These long and low vowels create a sepulchral mood, as if expressing feelings of mourning for the buck. They also contribute to the sense of desolate sameness that pervades the poem's setting—the endless stretches of trees and snow that the speaker describes. Interestingly, even in line six, this ending sound remains. This is surprising because line six stands out in so many other ways, formally and narratively. It describes the dead buck abruptly, and it stands alone in a one-line stanza, a stark departure from the previous six lines. Yet it, like the lines that precede it, ends with "snow." This repetition even across other changes emphasizes the unchangingness of the landscape—and, in turn, the constancy of nature itself even as individual creatures' deaths occur. The buck has died, but his death is part of a broader unending natural cycle that remains constant.
