[In the following essay, originally presented as a lecture in 1982, Ellis discusses MacLeish's poetic rendering of the nature of women as closer to the “truly true” than the nature of man.]

Edward Mullaly points out in his introduction to Six Plays that at the center of MacLeish's work is “an exploration of the nature of man.” Mr. Mullaly, of course, means to include women in that word “man” and thus to say that Mr. MacLeish's work explores the nature of the human. Mr. MacLeish himself frequently uses the word in the same sense, implying that men and women share certain traits that are uniquely human. His exploration of human nature seems to me to concentrate particularly on what are perhaps the quintessential experiences shared by all human beings: awareness of life and death, symbolized in Songs for Eve by the green and dry trees; awareness of self and the other, recognized in the same work by Adam, who “sees / His own two hands … / His flesh, his bone and … / Knows himself, and is”; and, third, awareness of love.

Since these three experiences are shared by both men and women, they raise several questions. For example, do men and women, for MacLeish, respond to these experiences in the same ways? If they do not, do those differing responses define a nature of woman that is distinct from that more general “nature of man” Mr. Mullaly referred to? Proof can be found everywhere in MacLeish's work that the answer to those questions is YES. Before I explore the works themselves, however, I'd like to quote statements made in conversation and recorded not on printed pages but on tape.

A year or so ago in an interview with Mr. MacLeish, I asked him: “Do you use your wife as an audience on whom to test your poems?” His answer was an emphatic NO, and he went on to explain: “She has a wonderful, literal-minded, womanly approach to the experience of life … literal-mindedness is very, very close to literality, to what is truly true. And women,” he went on, “are really close to what is truly true most of the time.” Several years earlier, Mr. MacLeish discussed J. B. with a group of college students who were preparing a production of the play. Commenting on the differences between the reading and acting versions of J. B., he said, “In the book it doesn't so much matter that the end of the play is Sarah's because in life … the end of the play is usually the woman's.”

Both of these statements suggest that MacLeish recognized qualities in women that he considered characteristic of all women, thus as “woman's nature.” The words, actions and descriptions of women in his poems and plays suggest that also. Although awareness of life and death, the self and the other, and love are all commingled, it is through the response to those experiences that the nature of woman is both explored and defined in MacLeish's work.

In Songs for Eve both Adam and Eve become aware of physical existence, both their own and one another's. Both of them discover the beauty of the world, of themselves, of each other; and both of them feel love. As Adam recognizes love, he regards it as “infinite.” Yet at the same time he fears the “dry tree,” which he equates with death—to him the end of self-awareness as well as the incomprehensible. As a result, when Eve gives birth to their first child, Adam urges her to “Cover that infant's mouth and eyes, / … softly where it lies: / The soul that lurks, the soul that flies, / Will enter where it clucks and cries. … I fear the souls … most.” Conception is a mystery to him; he sees the child as the creation of some “third” being beyond himself and Eve, who “Mingles to meddle / Beneath the green tree”—something separate but paradoxically inseparable from the green tree (life's tree), that threatens life itself and causes him to fear the “glimmering sky … vast overhead.” Unable to either understand or prevent that power, he can only fear it.

Adam's response suggests something in man's nature which needs to comprehend intellectually the mysteries of life, that searches for answers that can be understood by the reasoning capacities. Unlike Adam, Eve seems not only to accept the inevitable relationship between the green and dry trees (birth into life and death) but even to see their relationship as making the fall from Eden and all that Eden represents fortunate. She sings of how, in reaching out to take the apple from the green tree, she “heard beyond that tree a tree stir”—“heard the whole of time / and all of space give ringing rhyme,” and so she “reached out to touch and climb / In spite of space, in spite of time.” Thus in taking the apple, she knew she also took the dry tree.

She makes that statement clearly in her final song:

On first tree grew
Whereby I knew, …
Apple eaten of that tree
Animal I ceased to be.
On the last tree,
The dry tree,
Eternity
My fruit shall be.

And she goes on, being even more explicit in stating her perception of the meanings of the green and dry trees.

Green tree,
Time's tree,
Mystery
.....Apple eaten of that tree
Eve I was—and Eve might be.
Dry tree
Man's tree,
Eternity.
.....Apple eaten of that tree
Eve … shall cease—and be.

Here Eve herself uses the term “man” to include all humans, saying that the dry tree, for humans, is not simply the death of the mortal being but the means to immortal life. She does not reason it; she feels it.

This difference between woman's and man's awareness of life and death is stated much earlier in MacLeish's works, in “The Happy Marriage.” There the reader finds the following passage:

Man is immortal, for his flesh is earth,
And save he lives forever—why, he dies:
Woman is mortal, for her flesh will rise
In each new generation of her birth.
She is the tree: we [I assume he means men] are the feverish
Vain leaves that gild her summer with our own,
And fall and rot when summer's overblown,
And wish eternity and have—our wish.
And man, immortal, marries his own dreams
Of immortality in flesh and blood,
And mortal woman, wiser than she seems,
Marries her man for evil or for good,—
Wherein perception sees what reason blurs:
She was not his, but he was only hers.

It seems to me that what is being said here is that woman, whether because of some inner sensitivity—which Eve's experience on reaching out for the apple might suggest—or because of her function as childbearer and nourisher, accepts both mortality and immortality as facts, one as real as the other. Therefore the metaphor of the tree is appropriate in its imaging of woman since it is through the woman that both the green and the dry trees are realized. Man, on the other hand, while he accepts his own existence and thus his mortality, is less certain about his immortality. He is “immortal” precisely because immortality is what he least believes in but most wants. Since all he can know is the body, he “marries his own dreams of immortality”—he proves his existence to himself through the emotion and the act of love. By asserting his own reality, he denies death and the incomprehensible.

In another section of “The Happy Marriage,” the speaker, expressing the male protagonist's thinking, declares:

A woman was no lawyer's brief
Compounded to persuade the sense
Of things beyond experience
No woman's body could fulfill,
But Holy Writ that can distil
The very peace it promises.

What that seems to say is: a woman gives proof not of what is beyond life, but of life itself, of existence. Thus she brings peace by affirming to man his existence. If woman, then, represents proof of life to various characters and personae in MacLeish's works, and if life is imaged in the poet's works primarily by the green tree, then the question is: “Does woman represent life to MacLeish?” Is the woman's acceptance of the green and dry trees what constitutes her “womanly” nature, her “literality”? We would expect that if that is so, we would find that image of the green, or apple, tree a consistent image in the more personal poems. And in fact we do.

In “Poem in Prose,” a poem to his wife, MacLeish writes: “Where-ever she is it is now. / It is here where the apples are.”

In “Not Marble, Nor the Gilded Monuments,” the poet concludes:

Therefore I will not speak of the undying glory of women.
I'll say you were young and straight and your skin fair
And you stood in the door and the sun was a shadow of leaves on your shoulders
And a leaf on your hair—
I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women:
I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair.

Again in the poem titled “What Must” the leaf image is linked to life and love: It begins:

We lay beneath the alder tree
Her breast she leaned upon my hand
The alder leaf moved over me
The sun moved over on the land
Her mouth she pressed upon my mouth
I felt the leaf beat in her breast …

In this poem the link between awareness of life and death and of love is clearly stated; the difference between a woman's view of that link and a man's view are clear in these lines spoken by the male lover:

I felt the love go deep in me
That has no season in the earth
That has no time of spring or birth
That cannot flower like a tree
Or like one die
                                        but only be.

Love exists, he says; it has no beginning nor end; unlike the green tree which becomes the dry tree, love cannot die. He tells the woman:

Love has life not of love
But of us …

The woman, however, turns his words around, saying,

Love has life not of us
But of love …

The difference between their two statements is the key, I believe, to what MacLeish sees as the essential difference between man's and woman's natures: to man, existence is all that can be known with certainty and thus love is given its existence through human existence. To the woman, life includes both mortal existence and immortality, both what is known through experience and through reason and what is understood intuitively. She therefore recognizes something—some power—call it love—that is beyond the “us”. Her statement in this poem seems to me to be a restatement of Eve's song in which she says she heard “beyond that tree a tree.” Is that perception what MacLeish meant when he said “women are close to what is truly true”?

Again, in “What Must,” the lovers express their love for one another through the act of love. The poem, written in the mid-forties when MacLeish was in his mid-fifties, concludes with the lovers walking toward the future years and toward death hand in hand. There is no image of the dry tree in that poem. As they “walk together toward the trees / Where the road runs out of sight,” they see ahead only “the green beyond the leaves—the green cove below the light.” The act of love affirms life; love itself gives life meaning, and here the man, as in “The Happy Marriage” feels himself immortal as he “gilds her summer” with his own.

Twenty years later, in the late 1960s, MacLeish wrote a poem titled “April in November.” Here there are no signs of green: the ability to have the wish—the wish for immortality he states in “The Happy Marriage”—is not possible. The lines read:

Now, this later season of the year
There is no healing green, the bare
Bole stands broken for the world to see.
Unseasonable tempest: naked tree.

The experience that enables the man to assert his own existence, his own unending reality—the experience that in his “summer” years makes his wish for immortality come true—is in the past. This is the “later season,” the November of life, and only the “broken” “Bare bole”—the “naked tree”—is certain.

The need in man to affirm himself, his need to create love out of himself and his wish for immortality cause him to live his life differently from women, MacLeish seems to say in numerous poems and plays. Men, he says again and again, cannot live in the present. Women, on the other hand, can only live in the present. In Air Raid the girls' voices say, “Men never take the clock for now— / For this—for here. They never take the / Wish that this was why they waited. / … women … always do. Life's more itself for us than / them. They're always meddling with it— / Always making life come true …”

The women in the same play state the reason: “Death's the one thing every creature does / … [yet] Only boys and men like boys believe in it.” The old woman calls men “fools” because, she says, “they have no trust in the world,” adding that “there's no sin but not to trust the world.” Women, she seems to imply, do trust the world—life—they live in the now of the present.

This same idea is one underlying the experience of Elizabeth and Peter in the verse play This Music Crept by Me upon the Waters. Discussing the play in an interview, Mr. MacLeish said: The play deals with the confrontation of the affluent with the now. People of today, especially business people, live always “looking forward to the end of the month; looking toward the future.” But that is true, he added, of men much more than women, for women, he went on, “can live now, naturally do; and they have to, in many ways. But men are incapable of it.” He pointed out that in the play Peter “was living either in the immediate past … or the immediate future.” Elizabeth, though, can accept the present. In the play, she points out that the natives “have no word for time. They live NOW.” The man to whom she speaks comments, “Only the trees have found that fabulous country.” To which she responds, “The trees and I. … On this island here and now have met each other.” Notice that here too there is that same link of woman with the image of the dual trees.

MacLeish seems to say that it is the nature of woman to live in the present, to accept death as both a part of life and a promise of life. Because, in reaching out to take life's tree, woman also knew and took the promise of the dry tree, she is aware of herself and of the other in a way different from man. She is “not his”—not defined by him—but he is “only here” because through her, he affirms himself as existing. The ability of woman to hear behind the one tree that other tree as well reveals an intuitive sense that is not in man. In The Trojan Horse, the “woman who is most woman”—Helen—listens to what is inside the horse and the Blind man says, “Women hear heartbeats / Even behind the holiest appearances. / Treason betrays itself with women.” Other women in the play—Cassandra, the old woman, the young girl—all hear too. The men, however, cannot hear; they allow the horse to enter the city and the city falls.

In his introduction to Air Raid in Six Plays, MacLeish points out another kind of sensitivity possessed by women. He comments on Picasso's “Guernica,” saying, “There can be few living men or women—particularly women—who cannot bring its images to mind—the dead child and the shrieking woman.”

It seems that MacLeish, in his exploration of the nature of man, also explored and defined the natures of men and women and perceived in the sexes traits unique to each, traits related to their responses to awareness of life and death, self and other, and love. It is woman's nature, his works and his words say again and again, to live in the present, to accept what the mind cannot know, to see, hear and feel what is “truly true.” She is not the vessel of sin who, through Eve, brought upon mankind suffering, death and loss of innocence; she is the vessel through whom all humans are awakened to life, to spirituality and to immortality. For MacLeish, woman is close to the “truly true”—the green leaf lies in her hair, for she gives man affirmation of himself and fulfills his wish for immortality. That seems to be his definition of the nature of woman.