Sonnet 29 Analysis

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Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet born in 1892. She was the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.She had an unconventional childhood that led into an unconventional adulthood. She was an acknowledged bisexual who carried on many affairs with women, which is sometimes evident in her poems and plays. She did marry, but even that part of her life was somewhat unusual as she had extramarital affairs. Sonnet 29 is in the form of sonnet which has 14 lines of iambic pentameter. This sonnet was published in her collection The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems for which she received the Pulitzer award. The main theme of this poem is her unrequited love. She is addressing her lover and telling him not to pity her for things which she cant stop in nature. She doesn’t want to be pitied for those things which one can’t stop like passing of the day, it is natural for the sun to fade and darkness to set in. Season by season the time will pass and the fields will become thickets. She then carries on the idea of nature dying and becoming less and less beautiful, ‘beauties passed away from field and thicket’; this shows us that the magic and beauty of nature soon dies as ‘the year goes by’ (winter sets in – death is inevitable). She has taken this idea from her own experiences in life though we find them difficult to grasp. She uses the ‘waning of the moon’ and the ‘ebbing tide’ to show the retreating nature. Millay soon introduces direct references to love itself into the poem, ‘a man’s desire is hushed so soon’. She finds that her love was diminished too early – the sun had set too soon. She then takes a different tone in the third quatrain. The tone is much more angry, rather than sad as it had been in the past quatrains. She knows that, love, however glorious and beautiful, is going to be tested. If love is not true and strong, it will be

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