Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet, “What lips my lips have kissed and where and why” Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet, “What lips my lips have kissed and where and why,” is about being, physically or mentally jaded, and thinking back to the torrid love of one’s youth. The “ghosts” that haunt her are the many lovers of her past; she’s specifically trying to remember them all. She recalls the passion she experienced and how there was a certain feeling within herself. Millay shows this through her vivid imagery, use of the rain as a literary device and by paralleling herself with a lonely tree. The use of symbols sets the tone of the piece. She personifies the rain in, “But the rain/ Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh/ Upon the glass and listen for reply.” She makes t...
This is a deviation from the typical sonnet in the sense that the usual speaker is a male character praising the body of a lover, feature by feature. The breakdown of the body is one aspect that remains present in this sonnet; “when your mouth is an absence of screams” (Line 11). The metaphor use shows that at this moment she did not have a voice; she did not yet have a way to call out for help or express her emotions in this very early stage in the healing process. The moment after the assault is when the healing process begins; the sonnet expresses the emotions that she could not speak of at the time. The speaker calls attention to the eyes of the subject with the phrase, “your eyes’ salty runoff,” (Line 2). This metaphor is used to compare the tears that are running down her face to the small rivers that are drowning her. This suggests that she is being overwhelmed with emotions that she cannot put a name to. The typical sonnet examines the female body in a loving manner but Alleyne examines her body with a negative approach to amplify the wrongs that were committed against her
From the combination of enjambed and end-stopped lines, the reader almost physically feels the emphasis on certain lines, but also feels confusion where a line does not end. Although the poem lacks a rhyme scheme, lines like “…not long after the disaster / as our train was passing Astor” and “…my eyes and ears…I couldn't think or hear,” display internal rhyme. The tone of the narrator changes multiple times throughout the poem. It begins with a seemingly sad train ride, but quickly escalates when “a girl came flying down the aisle.” During the grand entrance, imagery helps show the importance of the girl and how her visit took place in a short period of time. After the girl’s entrance, the narrator describes the girl as a “spector,” or ghost-like figure in a calm, but confused tone. The turning point of the poem occurs when the girl “stopped for me [the narrator]” and then “we [the girl and the narrator] dove under the river.” The narrator speaks in a fast, hectic tone because the girl “squeez[ed] till the birds began to stir” and causes her to not “think or hear / or breathe or see.” Then, the tone dramatically changes, and becomes calm when the narrator says, “so silently I thanked her,” showing the moment of
Nearly four centuries after the invention of the sonnet, Oscar Fay Adams was born. He stepped into his career at the brink of the American civil war, a time when typically cold Victorian era romances were set in stark contrast to the passions of Warhawks. It was in this era when Adams wrote his sonnet: “Indifference”, which explores the emotional turmoil and bitterness a man endures as he struggles to move on from a failed relationship . Adams utilizes the speaker's story in order to dramatize the plight of an individual trying and failing to reconcile holding on to the joy that passionate love brings with the intense pain it bestows in conjunction with this joy . Adams employs various poetic devices in order to present a new view of indifference,
...ors to describe her life and situation. This comes primarily from the fact that in her therapy sessions that is how she is taught to deal with everything. For example, one metaphor she talks about is “… she comes up with the idea of lighting candles to symbolize my past, present, and future…I’ve noticed my past melting… my present candle has stayed pretty much the same,” (D 266). She explains them as her past is become less controlling, her present is her and concrete ideas and her future is bright and untouched. These metaphors show how much she has grown and allow the things she is learning to have more meaning. All of these combine to make the piece very effective and insightful. They help to get her point across and call people to action to help against these crimes.
One of the greatest poems in the English language has to be, “Tintern Abbey” by William Wordsworth. This passages takes us through a whirlwind of emotions, of a writer who comes back to one of his favorite places in nature, with his sister, and a roar of memories floods his body. He states that it has been five years since he last visited this location, sitting and listening to the nearby river, he writes. Wordsworth goes about describing this wonderful place, going all the way from the trees around him to the curling of the smoke from a nearby Cottage down the hill, he imagines this smoke as a hermit in the deep forest, waking in the morning. Then moving on to writing about his memory of the place in his past. Speaking of the beauteous forms that he would think of, to bring him back to this place when he was away in the noisy city, how this escape brought a tranquil restoration to his soul. There are instrumental things that are included in the poem, that can be put towards the absolute glory of nature, and how us human beings treat this silent beast. He looks into the future, and tells his smaller sister that he brought with him. Wordsworth knows that this place, this sanctuary, will always be an escape for him, and now his little sister. He finds joy in this realization, that what he has found will be a very instrumental in his sister’s life. He hopes to remember this place for the rest of time, and if he did stop, that he would die, and his sister would take his place. This whole passage is about messages that are expressed throughout, in the form of the Past, Present, and Future.
While perusing through the aggregate of the ballad, the storyteller gives the onlooker clear indications of misery by means of perplexity, unobtrusive triggers, affection, memories, and the perspective of a mother. The speaker affirms for us the affection she has for her dead youngsters and the frightful memories, which uncover themselves throughout the methodology of anguish. Perusing the sonnet likewise uncovers the truth this by all account not the only abortion the speaker is composing of, ended up being a real supporter to the lamenting in the ballad. The ballad is an extraordinary read for any novice or anybody encountered with verse. With a mixture of subjects all around the sonnet, one may find that there is more than simply despondency, which shows itself in the work.
defeating the villains and that the Gods are the good guys. However, minimal research will reveal that this isn’t the case. In Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet “I Dreamed I Moved among the Elysian Fields” she intertwines the allusions to mythological Greek woman with the speaker 's own experience to make a powerful statement on the sexual objectification and victimization of women in the 1930s.
The lyric can tell a story; it can convey an emotion. This doesn’t necessarily mean on a completely personal level. (EHH) It can be something set to music, something related specifically to the author who wrote it. It doesn’t always pertain to the listener. Lyric can refer to the words being sung but also the words in the poem. The lyric can portray what is going on in a writer’s head without necessarily portraying any sort of story. Keats, in his many sonnets, didn’t always tell stories: some were just letters to his friends or he even wrote one that had an elegy-tone to it for his grandmother after her death. In a way that the lyric doesn’t always tell a story is just like how it doesn’t always have to be set to music.
This quote describes how Louise Halfe uses all four common elements of native literature in her writings. I have chosen to discuss two of the elements she frequently uses, Spirituality and Orality in relation to three of her poems: My Ledders, She Told Me and The Heat of my Grandmothers.
In the poem “What Lips my Lips Have Kissed, and Where and Why”, Edna St. Vincent Millay elucidates that it is possible to feel alone in a relationship, and if a significant other doesn’t mean anything, then forgetting the details of a past romance is inconsequential: regardless of whether a lover is close or distant, a profound emptiness endures. Millay reaches this conclusion by first hinting in the title that the identities of the men are negligible— they all blend together and take a back seat to the woman’s desolation— as she uses synecdoche to refer to her past lovers as “lips” rather than people as a way of dehumanizing them; secondly, through melancholy imagery of ghosts which furthers the idea of an unseen force, or rather feeling, haunting her and beseeching attention, and she cannot be bothered to respond to these pleas, despite the fact that they “stir a quiet pain”, because it would do nothing to ameliorate her aloneness (line 6); and lastly, through the metaphor of a “lonely tree” whose boughs are “more silent than before” because Millay doesn’t specify that the tree was vibrant or prolific during summer or include any distinctive details about the birds: the focus is on the sense of solitude— none of the birds were special, but the woman misses having someone around to help foster the illusion that she isn’t alone, despite the fact that she is emotionally void (9-11).
In “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” Millay reminisces back to a time when she had one lover after another. She cries because she lost them all and instead of opening her heart to them and offering her love she remained closed off and simply enjoyed the physical connections. Edna St. Vincent Millay may have imagined a speaker for this poem but she makes it seem as if it is coming from her own personal experiences. Daniel Mark Epstein says that “the truth about her personal affairs was scarcely less fantastic than the rampant speculations; even now, historians find it difficult to separate Millay rumor from Millay fact.” The speaker is obviously at an older age now, and feels as if her youth was wasted. “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten,” is the first line in Millay’s sonnet. This line sets the tone and theme of the poem right away. She has been with many men in her younger years. Night after night, she remembers kissing them and being with them, but she admits to forgetting names, faces, locations, and even reason be...
Edna St. Vincent Millay has created complex as well as emotionally and politically charged poetry in her career. Her poetry is often considered expressive yet also indifferent by some critics. Yet, her skill with metaphor and other evocative poetic features bring us poems that are reflective of her self, and also ourselves as readers. By developing skilled metaphors for interpreting and developing her own identity as an author and for us as a reader, we are given a construction of selfhood. In this essay, I will analyze Edna St. Vincent Millay’s two poems; If I should learn, in some quite casual way, and What lips my lips have kissed in order to explain the meaning and presence of selfhood in lyric poetry. Through interpreting Millay’s poems, I will explain the construction of selfhood or identity in each poem through formal structures. Understanding selfhood comes with understanding one’s surroundings and how we are able to relate or compare ourselves to these surroundings. Edna St. Vincent Millay does a very complete job of bringing metaphor, narrative, diction and imagery to h...
In Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, Smith uses nature as a vehicle to express her complex emotions and yearning for a renewal of her spirit. Utilizing the immortal characteristics of spring and the tempestuous nature of the ocean, Smith creates a poetic world that is both a comfort and a hindrance to her tortured soul. Even while spring can provide her with temporary solace and the ocean is a friend in her sorrow, both parts of nature constantly remind her of something that she will never be able to accomplish: the renewal of her anguished spirit and complete happiness in life once more. Through three of her sonnets in this collection, Smith connects with the different parts of nature and displays her sensible temperament with her envy over nature’s ability to easily renew its beauty and vitality.
I have read her chapbook The Branches, the Axe, the Missing” several times and her words stirred in me the need to tap into my own emotions when I write my poetry. The amount of time she ponders regarding her relationship with her father appeals to my artistic inclination to explore further in my own poetry some of the relationships that have come and gone in my own life. Specifically, her work speaks to a long dormant relationship I had with my own father, a conflict that became an empty hole upon his death years ago. Her poems such as pages “Eighteen and “Twenty-six” were my favorite poems in her book. I have read poem twenty-six several times and have read it aloud to myself in the mirror. Charlotte Pence pens a concrete image of life with her father, intertwining in specific diction an event that has impacted her adulthood. This prose technique allows me to understand that the remembrance of one specific event in a relationship can affirm the infinite effect a relationship between a father and daughter has on the future. The lesson I learned from her work is that a good poet must avoid corny language in the process of writing a poem. I took this lesson to heart when I revised my poem “Stolen Trust” and my attempt to remember how one specific life event impacts how I view the world. Many of her words have a resonating ring of familiarity with me yet I am clear that my relationship with my father was much different that she has with her father. Thus, when I revise my poem I want to stick with the truth. I use the language I know and stick with the facts of the event. Even though I identify with Charlotte Pence and her words, my poetry is in my own
Sir Thomas Wyatt is credited as one of the first poets to bring the sonnet form into English literature, a form in which the speaker’s sincerity for, most commonly, a distant mysterious woman whom he loves, is believed to be the focal point of the poetry. From the selection of works which Wyatt wrote we can see many point in which the focal point is seemingly the earnestness of his love for his muse as authenticated by what he states in the poem itself. However, there is a sense of underlying meaning throughout his works which the reader must tease out themselves to see that that in fact is the focal point of his poetry.