Edna St. Vincent Millay What Lips My Lips Have Kissed

Analysis of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s
“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”
In the 1923 sonnet, “What lips my lips have kissed,” Edna St. Vincent Millay speaks about several loves coming to an end and the emotion its gives her while she reminiscences through her past. Two major themes of this sonnet are change and loss. The theme loss is throughout the entire sonnet.
Some parts of this sonnet are traditional while other parts are untraditional. This is a modern Italian sonnet. The speaker looks back on her younger days and feels pain and a sense of loss. The poet compares her lost lovers to ghosts in the octave, and the sestet would be the summer birds and passing of time. I think that Millay the poet is describing her own life experiences with her lost lovers.
I think Millay used “what lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” for the first sentence was to give the subject matter of the poem. Millay really wanted to clearly tell us that this poem is special to her and she remembers the kissing of many men she once loved.
In the first line Millay states she has forgotten. I think Millay loved many men and has forgotten their faces but remembers their lips and the love she felt. In the second and third lines, Millay pictures young men’s arms that have held her all
night: “what arms have lain under my head till morning.” Millay does not speak about the men’s faces or their smell as women usually do when they are in love with someone.
In the fourth and fifth line Millay imagines the tapping of the rain on the window as a symbol of the men trying to be with her again. “Is full of ghosts tonight that tap and sigh” means she is comparing her forgotten lovers to ghosts because ghosts are memories.
In the sixth, seventh and eighth lines Millay shows herself as lonely and sad. She thinks she will be alone forever and will never see her lovers again. “And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain,” states that she feels pain maybe for her past lovers also. She may feel that she caused pain to the lovers and feels bad that she did not truly love them back. She may have been a woman who would get men to love her and then move on to the next one because she got bored easily.
In the sestet, the last six lines, Millay feels she has gotten old. She feels like she will never be young again and will not be able to love again. She wishes when she was beautiful and young she would have loved the right way. “I cannot say what loves have come and gone;” meaning she once had lovers. She wasted her youth and now can no longer have young passionate love.
In lines nine, ten and eleven Millay compares herself to a lonely tree that misses the birds in the summer that sing around it. Now it is winter and the birds, representing as her lovers, are now all gone. She realizes what she had was beautiful like birds and now it’s all gone. In line twelve she says again she cannot remember her lovers.
She states “I cannot say what loves have come and gone,” because she does not remember the men that once loved her but only the feeling of love. In the thirteen and fourteen, she states the happiness she had by saying, “I only know that summer sang in me.” Summer is a metaphor for the happiness she had with her lovers, the birds, while she felt love. In the fourteenth line, Millay states that her joyful years of love are gone. The poet realizes what she once had was amazing and now realizes she took the men for granted. Now only if she could have one lover who would love her she would feel grateful this time
around.
Work Cited

Millay, Edna St. Vincent. “[What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why].” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Allison Booth and Kelly J. Mays. 10th ed. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010