5 Searing Sonnets of Loss by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St Vincent Millay’s skill as a poet expresses emotions of grief and loss in the most simple and eloquent of ways. She employs everyday language woven into a compelling picture of grief and loss whether it is bereavement or heartbreak.

Millay’s poems took a variety of forms with Sonnets being one of her particular specialties.

Below we present 5 of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s most beautiful sonnets of loss that

1. Time does not bring relief; you all have lied

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!

Sonnet II from Renascence

The power of the poet is to express as an individual, universal emotions. Here, Millay conveys the quiet anger of the recently bereaved in the face of well-intentioned platitudes. In the concluding sextet she sets a scene that resonates with all experiencing loss - the haunting places of memories.

2. Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring,

Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring,

And all the flowers that in the springtime grow,

And dusty roads, and thistles, and the slow

Rising of the round moon, all throats that sing

The summer through, and each departing wing,

And all the nests that the bared branches show,

And all winds that in any weather blow,

And all the storms that the four seasons bring.

You go no more on your exultant feet

Up paths that only mist and morning knew,

Or watch the wind, or listen to the beat

Of a bird's wings too high in air to view,—

But you were something more than young and sweet

And fair,—and the long year remembers you.

Sonnet III from Renascence

Life and nature in all its beauty go on without us and the lost love’s memory will live on in the beauty of the seasons.

3. When I too long have looked upon your face,

When I too long have looked upon your face,

Wherein for me a brightness unobscured

Save by the mists of brightness has its place,

And terrible beauty not to be endured,

I turn away reluctant from your light,

And stand irresolute, a mind undone,

A silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight

From having looked too long upon the sun.

Then is my daily life a narrow room

In which a little while, uncertainly,

Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,

Among familiar things grown strange to me

Making my way, I pause, and feel, and hark,

Till I become accustomed to the dark.

Sonnet VII from Second April

The powerful final sextet echoes the lonely dumb-struck emotions of bereavement and heartbreak.

4. And you as well must die, beloved dust,

And you as well must die, beloved dust,

And all your beauty stand you in no stead;

This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,

This body of flame and steel, before the gust

Of Death, or under his autumnal frost,

Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead

Than the first leaf that fell,—this wonder fled.

Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.

Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.

In spite of all my love, you will arise

Upon that day and wander down the air

Obscurely as the unattended flower,

It mattering not how beautiful you were,

Or how beloved above all else that dies.

Sonnet VIII from Second April

In this sonnet Edna St. Vincent Millay expresses universality of death that strikes the famous, the lovely and the much-loved.

5. Pity me not because the light of day

Pity me not because the light of day

At close of day no longer walks the sky;

Pity me not for beauties passed away

From field and thicket as the year goes by;

Pity me not the waning of the moon,

Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,

Nor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon,

And you no longer look with love on me.

This have I known always: Love is no more

Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,

Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,

Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales:

Pity me that the heart is slow to learn

What the swift mind beholds at every turn.

Sonnet from The Harp Weaver and Other Poems

The battle of emotion and rationality is sublime in this most favorite of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets.