Edna St. Vincent Millay

Normal Covers a Wide Range: The Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay

The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay is a composite of her own unique history: she thinks about it, reflects upon it, and recognizes how things happen in life and why. As a result, her poetry has a cause and effect quality, as though shaped by the people, events, and relationships influential to her thinking and behavior. However, Sigmund Freud says that the drives and impulses behind behavioral forces are internal. [comment1]He defines normal behavior as equilibrium in the trilogy of interactions among pleasure (the id), reality (the ego), and social constraints (the superego). Both the analyst and the poet create controversy by discussing the functionality of sex; the former

This feeling is particularly obvious in the sonnet beginning "What lips my lips have kissed" (1); the speaker's love life is characterized by a series of convenient relationships.Given lines seven and eight for analysis, "For unremembered lads that not again / Will turn to me at midnight with a cry," Dr. Freud might suggest that the impulsive sex serves the double purpose of sabotaging a promising relationship while feeding the needs of thespeaker's ego.Feminist and other [1] critically-oriented literary scholars who have learned how to identify objectification in their sleep certainly would not miss it in this poem. [comment4]But because convention is twisted by the poet's gender, this tactic seems fresher, less hurtful, and more amusing.There is novelty and irony in a woman using what may be considered the male gaze to scrutinize her own capriciousness.The use of analogy in the sestet ties together the transience of nature's beauty with the loss of magnetism that the aging speaker feels: "Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, / Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one" (9-10). Cyclicly, in nature, beauty which perishes will renew itself, but this speaker does not believe her last lover will be followed by another.As winter marks the ending of a year, so the speaker feels her beauty has faded with age and, as a result, her active love life has reached its

The speaker in "I, being born" has no memory of the past and no prevision of the future; she is not bitter, but objective and in total control of her emotions. [comment7]Her blasé attitude is in sync with her dispassionate actions. In contrast, "Women have loved" offers a protagonist of intense, even tragic vitality; this vitality expresses itself in ferocious, violent activity: "I find some woman bearing as I bear / Love like a burning city in the breast" (7-8). In like manner, the choice of the women of antiquity to which the speaker compares herself leads us to visualize her passion as a mighty and destructive force. Because of the intensely dissimilar overt attitudes, Freudians might have their work cut out for them in discovering a single covert meaning underlying these two poems. Likewise, feminists may scratch their heads in confusion because of the poet's refusal to fit her ideas neatly into a feminist package. Another interesting contradiction made obvious by comparing these two poems is: by the use of standard sonnet form, Shakespearian in "Women have loved" and Petrarchan in "I, being born," the poet's unorthodox views may receive the legitimacy of tradition while the content simultaneously mocks