Sonnet_29-Edna_St._Vincent_Millay-Analysis

Sonnet 29 is a sonnet written by Edna St. Vincent Millay. A sonnet including this particular one is a kind of poetry written about love. This particular sonnet shows us how we are blind in love and she also describes from a personal experience that love keeps decreasing. In this poem the speaker is the author herself who tells us from personal experience about love and shows it in a pessimistic light. One of the main themes of the poems is tormented love. The author may be speaking of her own lover or of her parents’ split up. In this poem she says that although love may start off very strong, eventually, over time, it keeps decreasing. The author did not have a very good childhood as at a very young age, her parents split up. Her mother inspired her to write a lot and it is possible that due to how she spent her childhood, moving from one relatives house to another and also all the heartbreaks she has faced, may have had an impact on her poetry. Later on in life, she was a rather controversial poet and also became a homosexual. One of the other themes may be unrequited love which is shown as she shows through the sonnet how her lover no longer loves her but shows that she still has feelings for her lover. In the first part of the octave, we see that Edna St. Vincent Millay describes things passing away or as some may say going down and ending. She says that the light goes away when the sun sets and the day passes by and is no longer there. She also mentions the year’s passing as one of the things. In the second quatrain, she speaks of the diminishing of the moon and the fading tides. Now in the later part of this quatrain, she does not talk about the things in nature that diminish in time but she now speaks of a man’s love for her that also reduces with time just as the sun goes down at the end of the day. In the sestet, she writes about how she always knew that the man’s love for her will reduce however, even after knowing this, she falls in love carelessly even though the mind knows she should be careful when in love. Edna St. Vincent Millay tells us through the poem that we should be careful when we fall in love because even after a lot of warnings from our brain, our heart does not seem to register the fact that one needs to be careful in love. The tone of the poem is rather melancholic as it tells us about unrequited love and shows that love isn’t always happy as at one point in time it does come to an end. She portrays love in a very pessimistic light and shows that if one isn’t careful in love a heartbreak can take place very easily. Through Sonnet 29, she tries to express the pain felt by a tormented lover and how she used to have so much love and it has passed away just as beauties of nature and other things. One of the main literary techniques that have been used by the poet is Allusion, where she has made us feel the presence of her lover at the end who has broken her trust and heart as well. Another technique used could be an analogy as Edna St. Vincent Millay is comparing the diminishing of the moon and fading tides to the vanishing love that a man may have for their lover or just in general as in her opinion love diminishes with passage of time. In this poem, even a couplet has been used as she relates her heart being slow to learn although her mind understands quickly that one needs to be careful in love. In my opinion the author may just feel so as she may have suffered a major heartbreak by a man a while before she writes the poem. This also may be the cause that she is being bias towards men. Another reason may be because, as a child, her father left her mother, her and her sisters alone without any money to find a place to live on their own. She may be upset about this fact and is possibly referring to her father’s love that diminished for her mother. According to me, this hadn’t only had an impact on her poetry but had possibly made her bias towards men.