A Look into Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Poem

Edna St. Vincent Millays rime What lips my lips contract kissed evokes a sad song that where a lady is regretting any the have it awayrs she had lost. The choice of this particular song by Edna St. Vincent Millay could be justified by the fact that leaders can slow relate to it because it talks about a popular theme, which is love. Although it reeks of regret and loneliness, the poet effectively successfully used glaring symbols and words to describe the previous(prenominal) events that transpired in her feel.In the poem, the speaker casts herself as a lonely tree. One writer, Epstein (2001) proclaims that this poem is a summing up of the roots love life to date, and an occasion to invoke the important themes of elegy, the tempus fugit and the ubi sunt (p. 139)What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and whyI have forgotten, and what blazon have lainUnder my head till dawning . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .And in my heart there stirs a fluent painFor unre membered lads that not againWill bring to me at midnight with a cry.Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, heretofore knows its boughs more silent than before.It seems that the speaker in the poem is an aging lady gumption by the songless tree. Indeed, she is an picture of loneliness and regret, one that we might be tempted to read as a prototype of abandoned womanhood, unworthy and powerless. Male desire in the love sonnets where the woman as a speaker always masquerades maidenly weakness and sentimentality often beseeching, and consumed by desire. However, when a male lover speaks, it would imply authority of despicable and, perhaps more importantly, with the authority of convention. When Millay masquerades as a male poet masquerading as a lovesick woman, the sense impression of where sincerity meets gesture and how authority aligns itself with sexual practice is confused (Freedman, 1995, p. 113).In its structure, the poem is classified as a sonnet that has a particular rhyme pattern abbaabba cdedce. The poem uses alliteration and assonance. It is also moneyed in naturally-occurring symbols, which all readers can easily connect. The poem begins with a one-sentence octave that presents the situation in which the teller finds herselfinside a house during the rain, reminiscing about her past and forgotten lovers.The inverted sentence structure of the foremost two lines almost suggests a question sooner than a statement How many lovers were there? The alliterations in the first line additionally emphasize the repetitiousness of the narrators sexual encounters. At the very(prenominal) time, the perfect tense mean that this phase of her life has been completed, and the body part symbolisms of lips, arms, and head imply her blank from the experience.In the third line, Millay moves to the present tense, where she describes the memories of her lovers (using a spook metaphor) aroused by the rain, a symb ol for moroseness and melancholia. These be the lovers that tap and sigh. The narrator seems insinuating that the lovers themselves are irrelevant. For the same reason, Millay picks a metaphor that hints at facelessness and pretermit of welcome and resonates with the specific time of the midnight hour.The substitution phrase in this section is quiet pain, an almost-oxymoron suggesting that the narrators brokenheartedness is muted or accepted (Schurer, 2005). As signified by the forward movement of tenses, Millay gives the readers a subtle glimpse of things to come as well However, undeniably, she dec everything and she expects no intimacy in the future.In the end, the feminine narrator seems not interested in the identity of her lovers as in the memory of the emotions they allowed her to experience. Despite the melancholy and regret, the narrator presented peace or redemption as a faint echo of the emotion of love from her youth (Schurer, 2005). Despite the lonely themes an d symbols, we can sense of equality in love to the demand by women that they be allowed to enter the world of adventure and taste in love which men have presbyopic inhabited. However, Millay does not sound to be any womens liberationist to argue for that equality. She just makes it subtle, exhibits it in this poem and turns it into beauty. plant CitedEpstein, Daniel Mark. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York Holt, 2001.Freedman, Diane P., ed. Millay at coulomb A Critical Reappraisal. Carbondale, IL Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.Schurer, Norbert. Millays what lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, The Explicator, 63.2 (Winter 2005) 94-97.