Edna St. Vincent Millay What Lips My Lips Have Kissed Analysis

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Edna St. Vincent Millay, in her conventional sonnet “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where and Why,” asserts that love comes and goes. To develop her claim, Millay begins by first using imagery to describe the speaker’s past relationships which continue to haunt her as they “tap and sigh” upon her glass; second, the speaker is compared to a “lonely tree,” and this metaphor among others serves to show how deprived of love the speaker currently is even though she once had the arms of her lovers “under [her] head until morning”; last, personification is used when the speaker says, “I only know that summer sang in me / A little while, that in me sings no more,” and this reveals to the reader that love is a thing of the past for speaker; the

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