"What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why," Edna St. Vincent Millay

[lnhammer]

Enough theoretical discussion -- back to the love poems. Here's one by one of the better love poets of the last century.


What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts to-night, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
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:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.


Do you have a favorite love sonnet?

---L.

Comments

[lnhammer]

That is an excellent sonnet.

(Even aside from the content, I especially like its demonstration of controlling the pacing of a sonnet, which is not something that gets talked about much. But then, pacing is rarely talked about in lyric forms, as opposed to narrative and dramatic ones.)

---L.

[gramina]

Yes; one of the things I like about it is that you can read the poem out loud as though it were prose -- I'm not sure how to describe the quality I'm talking about. Some of it is the way the lines often continue straight on through the line breaks, and some of it is the naturalness of the word choices and suchlike, but ... ? There ought to be a way to say what I mean without an entire paragraph of opacity :)

I also like how it almost has two turns in it, making three sections instead of the usual two -- there's the first 8 lines, talking about all the things love can't do; then there's five (and a half?) talking about what might be motive enough to give up the memory of love. That final "It well might be. I do not think I would" catches my breath every time I read it.