Edna St. Vincent Millay, a sonnet (Lucky Words Podcast 2025, episode 10)

I recorded this while sitting on the shady bank of the Provo River, shoes off and feet in the water. It was over 90º outside, and my spot was one of the best places I can imagine along the entire Wasatch Front today.

Text of poem

This is the second sonnet in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascence and Other Poems, published in 1917.

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

This is a fun little poem, both highly felt and still deliberately clever. Millay is often a clever poet, and sometimes I think her cleverness gets in the way of sentiment. I don’t know if that’s the case here, but I don’t think so. What do you think?

I didn’t mention this in the audio, in part because I was trying to keep it nice and tight and brief, but the rhyme scheme here actually is interesting: ABBACDDCEFGGEF. You feel the rhymes in the middle of the quatrains (or the sestet at the end), but because they come in the middle of an idea, they’re not emphasized. Pain-rain, lane-remain, place-face are pretty strongly rhymed word pairs, but I’ll bet you did not even notice the rhyme when I read it aloud.

This is another example of Millay’s cleverness: it’s almost like she’s using the rhyme just because she digs the constraint of it, and not because it ads to the musicality of the poem. (Yes, someone might argue about this sonnet’s musicality, but I myself don’t think that she’s using the rhyme for that purpose.)