Edna St. Vincent Millay: An Italianized Sonnet

One of the women made the comment that Mrs. Wright used to be pretty and happy, when she was Minnie Foster not Minnie Wright. This is just the beginning of realizing that she was just pushed to far into depression and couldn't live up to John Wright's expectations anymore. The Wrights had no children and Mrs. Wright was alone in the house all day long. The women perceive John Wright to be a controlling husband who in fact probably wouldn't have children and this may have upset Mrs. Wright. They eventually find vacant bird cage and ponder upon what happened to the bird, realizing Mrs. Wright was lonely they figured she loved the bird and it kept her company. The women make reference to the fact that Mrs. Wright was kind of like a bird herself, and that she changed so much since she married John Wright. They begin looking for stuff to bring her and they find the bird dead and they realize someone had wrung its neck. This is when they realize Mrs. Wright was in fact pushed to far, John Wright had wrung her bird's neck and in return Minnie Wright wrung his.

In lines 9-11 the author utilizes a metaphor of "the lonely tree" to describe how the speaker feels when all of her lovers finally leave her (line 9). In line 12 though, the author switches back to first person point of view and concrete concepts, in which the speaker describes how she once was very happy, but now does not know what it is like to be loved.

In the third stanza, the persona emphasizes the point that everything seems to be going wrong. He adds that the days are twice as long and the birds have forgotten their song. This only shows us that the persona probably experiences sleepless nights and awaits for morning with much eagerness - the birds seem to take longer to announce that morning has come by their singing (Johnson 1). To collaborate this with the idea that everything reminded the persona of the departed, it seems that the persona spends his days and nights thinking about the dear person or object.

The author first depicts winter imagery when describing the “lonely tree” (9) and how the birds have all vanished because it evokes the image of a bare tree as all the birds have left and migrated south for the winter. Winter is a cold, depressing season because everything is gone, the leaves, the birds, the plants, just like the speakers love interests all have gone too. Thus the winter images add further to the longing attitude of the speaker. Then, the author contrasts the winter imagery with summer images. Summer is the season of joviality and lightheartedness, but the speaker states that what “summer sang in me” (13) is gone, which infers that the speaker’s happiness and lively spirit is gone because all her past loves have left.

Poetry can be an escape for the artist as they release any emotion he or she may be feeling. This is exactly what Edna St. Vincent Millay was doing in her poem, “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, And Where, And Why” where she discusses her forgotten loves. Millay uses her structure and symbolism to represent her forgotten loves and feelings.

They are also written lyrically, from a first person point of view, to express a person’s private emotional experience. In the 1923 Italian sonnet “What lips my lips have kissed” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, the poet speaks about her nostalgia for her old lovers, and her gradual hopelessness towards ever finding something real because of all the pain these past loves have caused. Thus, the two main themes in this poem are change and loss and are symbolized by the use of the Italian sonnet structure form as well as alliteration and assonance. The sonnet is

In the poem “620. Sonnets from the Portuguese” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Barrett presents the narrator describing the unqualified love she feels for an unnamed character. Through the use of diction and tone, Barrett suggests that love should be unconditional, in order to be authentic. The author presents this idea to make the readers reflect on the similarities between a person who loves passionately and the way God loves his children.

She says “yet many a man is making friends with death.” Many people don’t have somebody there to show them the right way because they still haven’t found love. The imagery helps us understand the meaning of a poem and what the author is

These lines, which describe the motion and sound of the storm, are thematically creating conflict between the author and nature. In the follow phrases, “Leaves…hissed/ Blindly struck at my knee…/…sinister in the tone”, gives a negative tone to the metaphorical storm within the poem. Their rhythmic pattern aligns with that of the last lines of the poem starting with “Word”, which are describing his loneliness. “Word I was in the house alone//Word I was in my life alone, /Word I had no one left buy God”, continue this pattern of very metrical lines of three (13, 15-16. Theses two sections of lines are not only metrically similar, but thematically. They are no longer questioning the trials of his loss of love, as he is no longer questioning. The two sections are described through sound, which is a motif throughout the poem. The storm’s description with sound connects with the other passage of same foot pattern as the narrator believes that someone has spread word of his loneliness, could this be the nature? These sections are also following the same end rhyme scheme “hissed/…missed/…tone” and “alone/…alone/…God”(9-11, 13,15-16). The meanings may reflect each other in these passages, the sense of nature being the one acknowledging the narrator’s loneliness with the storm. It is not clear who knows of his loneliness in the poem, but from the similarities in theme and meter it can be assumed that the storm is spreading word of his

The entire time, he is talking about birds but, that is just a metaphor. These birds kill so viciously, they are not just killing gently, if even that is a thing but I mean it is not a hit and go. They make sure that their prey is in pain and they do not stop until they are. Or they even make sure that the prey is in pain but, leave and the birds do not put it out of misery. “And tugging and tearing without let or pause” (line 11), in this section of the poem, it shows how the birds attack. These birds are attacking and tearing apart the prey and they do not stop. This just shows much more on how the birds are destroying. Another quote from the poem,“Their shadow dims the sunshine of our day.” (Line 1) Always on the darkest days that comes destruction, just as the quote said. Before the birds seeked out their prey, it was the brightest day but, when they killed their prey, it got very cloudy and

This quotation shows the significance of the bird and how it directly correlates to the murder of Mr. Wright. Mr. Wright felt compelled to murder the one thing that his wife loved, showing how inferior women are to their

Sonnet 43, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, is a classic love story written to explain how she feels about love. How Do I Love Thee, has a variety of interpretations, a multitude of symbols, follows an iambic pentameter, and tells the reader a story. Browning does all of this in a fourteen-line sonnet that she wrote for her beloved husband. To understand this, the reader has to make interpretations on their own.

The mention of rain in the air leads one to think of rebirth also. This hints that Mrs. Mallard feels cleansed and washed from the rain that is in the air. This shows us that as she mourns the death of her husband, she is seeing the bright future she has for years to come. She is now secretly rejoicing in her new freedom. This is a new and different view the most of the women in this time period.

The main idea of the song that the author wants to tell us about was pretty clear, but it could have a lot of meaning, depends on the person who listens to the song. The song start with the memories “The fingertips across my skin/ The palm trees swaying in the wind/ Images ” in the

In the poem, the speaker tells about his macaws that sleep in their cage. They never sing or fly, but according to the speaker, they dream of the date trees that are far away. Waters (2005) calls this “another image of royal and exotic birds that varies this recurring picture of a painful and insuperable divide between art and life. […] Rare, isolated from the world, crowned, and arranged “in schlanken ringen,” the parrots epitomize a realm of formal aesthetics […] [D]ozing, they nod, as if assenting to their confinement for beauty’s sake.”