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Complete Study Guide for 'What Lips my Lips...' by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Anatomy of a Sonnet: Millay’s "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why"
Explore Edna St. Vincent Millay’s profound Petrarchan Sonnet, a melancholic reflection on the irreversible passage of time and the isolation of surviving the "summer" of youth. Published in 1922, this masterpiece captures both personal heartbreak and the collective, lingering trauma of a post-WWI world
The Internal Conflict of Memory: An examination of the speaker’s struggle against "self-protective amnesia" and the "quiet pain" of forgetting past intimacy.The poem uses a triple inquiry ("what," "where," "why") to highlight the blurring of a distant, unreachable past.
- Nature as Emotional Mirror: A study of the poem’s core metaphors, where rain represents haunting memories of "unremembered lads," and the speaker is personified as a lonely winter tree whose "birds" (past lovers) have vanished.
- Structural Architecture: An analysis of the strict 14-line Italian form
The Octave (Lines 1-8): Establishes the problem of fading memories through a fractured, breathy rhythm created by alliteration and caesura.
- The Volta (Line 9): Marks the definitive shift from direct description to broader metaphorical reflection, signaled by the word "Thus" and a change to a trochaic rhythm.
- The Sestet (Lines 9-14): Provides a resolution of somber acceptance, contrasting the "summer" that once sang within the speaker with the silence of the present.
- Biographical and Historical Context: Insight into how Millay’s reputation for sexual freedom in Greenwich Village and her pacifist beliefs inform the poem’s themes of lost vitality and the "Lost Generation" of young men who vanished during the Great War.
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