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

More than the Lost Kisses and Lovers

A Look into Edna St . Vincent Millay 's Poem What lips my lips have kissed

Edna St . Vincent Millay 's poem What lips my lips have kissed ' evokes a sad song that where a lady is regretting all the lovers she had lost The choice of this particular poem by Edna St . Vincent Millay could be justified by the fact that readers can easily relate to it because it talks about a universal theme , which is love . Although it reeks of regret and loneliness , the

poet effectively successfully used palpable symbols and words to describe the past events that transpired in her life

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 author 's] love life to date , and an occasion to invoke the classic themes of elegy , the tempus fugit and the ubi sunt (p . 139

What lips my lips have kissed , and where , and why

I have forgotten , and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before

It seems that the speaker in the poem is an aging lady signified by the songless tree . Indeed , she is an epitome of loneliness and regret , one that we might be tempted to read as a prototype of abandoned womanhood pathetic and powerless . Male desire in the love sonnets where the woman as a speaker always masquerades feminine weakness and sentimentality often beseeching , and consumed by desire . However , when a male lover speaks , it would imply authority of suffering and , perhaps more importantly , with the authority of convention . When Millay masquerades as a male poet masquerading as a lovesick woman , the sense of where sincerity meets gesture and how authority aligns itself with gender is confused (Freedman , 1995 ,

. 113

In its structure , the poem is classified as a sonnet that has a particular rhyming pattern : abbaabba cdedce . The poem uses alliteration and assonance . It is also rich 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 narrator finds herself--inside a house during the rain , reminiscing about her past and forgotten lovers . The inverted sentence structure of the first two lines almost suggests a question rather than a statement : How many lovers were there The alliterations in the first line additionally emphasize the repetitiveness of the narrator 's sexual encounters . At the same 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 distance from the experience

In the third line , Millay moves to the present tense , where...