Edna St. Vincent Millay

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Throughout much of her career, Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most successful and respected poets in America. She is noted for both her dramatic works, including Aria da capo, The Lamp and the Bell, and the libretto composed for an opera, The King’s Henchman, and for such lyric verses as “Renascence” and the poems found in the collections A Few Figs From Thistles, Second April, and The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Like her contemporary Robert Frost, Millay was one of the most skillful writers of sonnets in the twentieth century, and also like Frost, she was able to combine modernist attitudes with traditional forms creating a unique American poetry. But Millay’s popularity as a poet had at least as much to do with her person: she was known for her riveting readings and performances, her progressive political stances, frank portrayal of both hetero and homosexuality, and, above all, her embodiment and description of new kinds of female experience and expression.  Source

Sorrow

Sorrow like a ceaseless rain 

Beats upon my heart. 

People twist and scream in pain, — 

Dawn will find them still again; 

This has neither wax nor wane, 

Neither stop nor start. 

 

People dress and go to town; 

I sit in my chair. 

All my thoughts are slow and brown: 

Standing up or sitting down 

Little matters, or what gown 

Or what shoes I wear.

Published:

1892

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Modernism

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Doubt & Fear

Literary Devices:

Enjambment

a line break interrupting the middle of a phrase which continues on to the next line

Imagery

visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work

Simile

a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”