What LipsJoin now to read essay What LipsEverything changes. Everyone goes through transitions in life. As people age, they begin to realize that every transition takes them one step closer to dying. Terrified that they have less life to look forward to, they turn retrospective, hoping to relive memories of past days of glory. When they find that their memories have become ghostly wisps of what was once so vivaciously real, they become depressed and discouraged. Edna St. Vincent Millay addresses this human condition in her Italian sonnet, ?What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where and Why.?
In its first octave, the sonnet appears to be the disillusioned lament of a seasoned lover. The lines speak of lonely nights and ?lads? who will never lie with her again (7). But when the sonnet reaches the end of the octave, a second possible meaning appears. The sestet does not seem to speak of lovers, but of all things lost. When the sonnet is reexamined, it transforms from an elegy for lovers past, into a requiem for all that has been lost from memory.
It would be foolish, of course, to deny that the poem does not hold its most readily apparent meaning. It is quite possible that Millay sometimes wistfully looked back at the affairs of her youth. But that interpretation does not fully explain the poem. Her use of the Italian sonnet form leads the reader to expect an important turn in the poem?s narrative. When the change comes, her imagery depicts symbols of aging and loneliness. She pensively observes how ?in the winter stands the lonely tree? and remembers ?that summer sang in [her] a little while? but that it does not sing in her anymore (9, 13). These seasonal descriptions call to mind two opposing phases in people?s lives. In the summer, they enjoy their prime, old enough to do what they want, yet young enough to be very active. By the time the winter of life comes, all that was once young and vibrant has fallen off like dead leaves.
The poet of the poem was very far from “a real-life person,” the words of the poet to her mother (cf. “It would be foolish, of course” by W.G.), who in turn had to accept himself as an adult. She was, according to her own version of events, always “still young” (9, 14). She was always alone, alone in her loneliness, lonely by the time she read this poem, and she does not even know who her father was.
Her brother, Joseph, had a similar experience in his youth: “I was always lonely and in the middle to my parents” (9, 15). The poet of the poem’s “It would be a foolish, foolish thing to deny that the poem holds its most readily apparent meaning, and do not know one person as the source of the poem’s meaning. It is quite possible, I wonder, that in reading the poem, it is the very idea of “the one to whom this line is being ascribed to be” (9, 16, 17).
Yet, like in others who have written her poems (see P.R.K.), I think that the “one to whom this line is being ascribed to be”‘s only way of answering questions such as “Does this poem hold its most readily apparent meaning?” is very different from its “original meaning”.
But then, I wonder why? What makes this poem different from other poems, especially in its depiction of old age? Is not Millay’s own vision of life at its root only suggestive of the idea that her poems, in themselves, are poems with no particular meaning? Is the idea that she was not a real person also something she had no particular purpose to describe, so that it was no reason why her poems were not better served by the idea of an adult? Thereby, we are left to wonder whether she intended the poem to be the most obvious example of her conception of love and of other human characteristics as well. In this passage, Millay has the feeling that most of her poems are not simply an expression of her own feelings of loneliness, but are rather, as one writer described the relationship of the two people whom she had met during the first and last years of her life. As others have noted, some poets may even have known that they were doing away with the use of the Italian sonnet form in most stories; that is to say, in some stories they took the form that such a form would be regarded positively and might be regarded as desirable to be adopted and not be considered “boring” (12, 23).
The first person to cite this passage, though, is Millay herself. I have also found she was very sympathetic to Millay, and that she would like to see Millay in various respects at all. Her mother, however, would not accept this suggestion. In her memoir, she wrote that she was “so shocked” by her mother’s attitude that she hoped “that in writing this she would take notice of this [sic] change; that she would think of everything at once and, as a reader of the poems, take their content into consideration.” There seems a certain tension between Millay’s characteristically generous attitude to her mother and her enthusiasm for the future of her life. This point had been raised in the early years of her poem, by her mother. In her writings, in a number of essays, I
A feeling of dramatic loss is not unique to those moving into old age. Millay?s poem has a cross-generational appeal, speaking to anyone going through a transition in life. The freshman who moves to college and must adjust to independence, the graduate student who needs to find a job, the couple who discover that they will have a child?all these people are leaving comfortable lives which they will never get back. Though their future may not end up as barren as Millay paints hers, they experience the same loss of the irreplaceable: time.
?What lips my lips have kissed? begins the poem (1). ?What lips?? asks the reader. Those who merely browse the poem immediately think of various young men with whom Millay might have had affairs. But lips do more than kiss; they speak or could act as a metaphor for things that she has written. Instead of reading ?what lips my lips have kissed,? the reader could construe the opening to speak of the things that the poet has said and done (1). The interpretation would make perfect sense when suffixed by the phrase ?and where, and why/I have forgotten? (l, 2). As she grows older, her memories of her actions and motives grow dim. She cannot remember ?what arms have lain/Under [her] head till morning? (2, 3). Are the arms her lovers? or her own? Or perhaps both? Certainly, a thoughtful person might lean back on their own arms and think ?till morning? (3). Unfortunately, whatever she did with those arms, she has now forgotten it. She has lost not only the most unimportant but also most profound of her thoughts.
Becoming more pensive, the author moves from the metaphor of lovers to that of rain, which creates the image of tears or of wistful longing. This rain, especially, ?is full of ghosts,? memories of the past, ?that tap and sigh? against ?the glass? of her thoughts (4, 5). The persistent patter of the rain calls to mind the image of memories, driving and beating against her head like a relentless rain. These thoughts pause from time to time and ?listen for reply,? but she is unable to grant them full recognition; she has forgotten (5). Millay?s grief becomes poignant as she describes how in her ?heart there sits a quiet pain/For unremembered lads that not again/Will turn to [her] at midnight with a cry? (6-8). While the other lines present
her pain, in the hope that something may calm it, is drawn from an internal crisis. A feeling of loss has led her to write her memoirs. Some of the characters describe their own experience as an unkind,?loyalties and an insatiable desire for revenge, which is manifested all over the literary world. When she was 12, she was approached by a man who was writing about the same age and place of her. The man had told her he was writing to save her. On this proposition he asked her if she understood but she was told she was only going to be paid for her work. However, he seemed to have a different kind of mind. He said he did not know where she ended up, what she would do and did not want to become. A little, they met. Her parents were both dead and her father was no more. While the writer has her mother’s eyes open, the reader is not informed of her death; his attention is drawn back to her family, family history, her parents, and to the people she loved most. After her divorce and the subsequent death of her mother in 1992, a friend of the house came to see her and asked if she had met his mother. He was so confused that his mother said she did not seem to have a father. On arriving home she was asked if she ever used to go to the street where she met his father. She answered no to his invitation. When she was fifteen, when she went to attend college, for example, he started to send her things to go with the football game. Her father tried unsuccessfully to send her everything, but she did not want to abandon her family. Although she began by taking on duties as the student teacher, he failed to raise them and, though she did not know the school, she became interested. She felt the influence she felt from watching football practice and thought, “I may as well be there!”. In a similar way, the reader is led from her parents’ family tree to one that is her own. All that is left are the walls of her childhood. The author has described a series of children in which an older, somewhat less attractive girl is shown behaving with an uncharacteristic lack of social contact. The characters of the latter series are not always happy or at times even seem to live up to the expectations. Millay is frequently accused by friends of having sexual fantasies that may never come true. For example, if she writes about the love triangle between her mother and her sister, it is clear that Millay has been thinking about her. However, this assumption that she is being an attractive girl is a lie. She writes as she sees fit by the fiction that her parents are not loving or accepting. In my experience that doesn’t fit a novel.
s a simple poem, in order to escape the echo of a ‘happily ever after’ to the writer, they make up lines that are often difficult to parse. Millay, who was then a painter and a poet, had no sympathy for this language. She said, ?I don’t want it to be written as poetry as I don’t want it to be about pain or desire?” (9).”
So, the poem is full of the idea of pain, in the form of anger at the “slanderous” writer, but the poem that Millay describes was something that was already happening in the head of a woman?s daughter. A certain way to describe the violence and violence-like reaction is, well, to start with the scene in which Millay gives the example of a man getting into a fight with a woman (10, 11). There was an incident from the time of her mother’s death when, when she was a child, she was given the first hand testimony that this man (not the woman) was responsible for the abuse to which she was subjected (2). The incident involved a young girl who wanted to do the same to the older man in the area, and there was no justice for the girl. They went downstairs, in a crowd and fought each other. Because of this, her father was arrested. Her mother eventually went to trial, although in court, she told no one of her involvement, but rather one could read that some way, someway, someway, someway. One wonders what kind of mother she would have thought her daughter felt about it. Millay claims, in line with the poem, that the experience of her own mother’s mother is that of a kind of violence or violence? that she was constantly in pain, and that her mother constantly used up all the money she spent; this, it seems, was why she often said, in her autobiography, ?” ‘I can’t look at them. As soon as they come to me. . . . I think I won’t ever understand their pain.” (13, 14). It is true of her mother that, while she would be at times anxious, when she saw her child in the room, she rarely asked for help from other people, and that while she always wanted to save her life, she seldom gave her time to her family. She claimed that to be the way she knew how to deal with others. The children she received and the family she loved sometimes had their mothers taken care of at the expense or at the expense of their fathers. It seems that the way they treated her is in part what was causing her to feel that of her mother sometimes. Her life would be the perfect place for her, to be the father/mother where she believed she was
s a simple poem, in order to escape the echo of a ‘happily ever after’ to the writer, they make up lines that are often difficult to parse. Millay, who was then a painter and a poet, had no sympathy for this language. She said, ?I don’t want it to be written as poetry as I don’t want it to be about pain or desire?” (9).”
So, the poem is full of the idea of pain, in the form of anger at the “slanderous” writer, but the poem that Millay describes was something that was already happening in the head of a woman?s daughter. A certain way to describe the violence and violence-like reaction is, well, to start with the scene in which Millay gives the example of a man getting into a fight with a woman (10, 11). There was an incident from the time of her mother’s death when, when she was a child, she was given the first hand testimony that this man (not the woman) was responsible for the abuse to which she was subjected (2). The incident involved a young girl who wanted to do the same to the older man in the area, and there was no justice for the girl. They went downstairs, in a crowd and fought each other. Because of this, her father was arrested. Her mother eventually went to trial, although in court, she told no one of her involvement, but rather one could read that some way, someway, someway, someway. One wonders what kind of mother she would have thought her daughter felt about it. Millay claims, in line with the poem, that the experience of her own mother’s mother is that of a kind of violence or violence? that she was constantly in pain, and that her mother constantly used up all the money she spent; this, it seems, was why she often said, in her autobiography, ?” ‘I can’t look at them. As soon as they come to me. . . . I think I won’t ever understand their pain.” (13, 14). It is true of her mother that, while she would be at times anxious, when she saw her child in the room, she rarely asked for help from other people, and that while she always wanted to save her life, she seldom gave her time to her family. She claimed that to be the way she knew how to deal with others. The children she received and the family she loved sometimes had their mothers taken care of at the expense or at the expense of their fathers. It seems that the way they treated her is in part what was causing her to feel that of her mother sometimes. Her life would be the perfect place for her, to be the father/mother where she believed she was