Poetry Thursday - two poems by Edna St Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why

BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

"What my lips have kissed, and where, and why..." by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Source: Collected Poems (Harper & Row, 1956)

Millay’s popularity as a poet had at least as much to do with her person [as with her skill]: 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. 

From almost universal acclaim in the 1920s, Millay’s poetic reputation declined in the 1930s.
By the 1960s the Modernism espoused by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and W. H. Auden had assumed great importance, and the romantic poetry of Millay and the other women poets of her generation was largely ignored. But the growing spread of feminism eventually revived an interest in her writings, and she regained recognition as a highly gifted writer.

I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn wtih pity, -- let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again. 

Edna St. Vincent Millay