Love, loss, memory, and pain, these are some of the topics discussed in the poem, “ONLY UNTIL THIS CIGARETTE HAS ENDED” is a poem written by the poet Edna St Vincent. In the poem, we see the speaker is smoking a cigarette whilst contemplating her lover. The poet Edna St Vincent uses Symbolism, diction, and figurative language to suggest that the speaker has a painful time moving on and forgetting the lover, even though the lover has already moved on.
Symbolism in the poem is used to describe a painful setting. That setting is used to symbolize the pain the speaker is experiencing when she reflects on her lover. The phrase “ firelight to a lance extended”(4) describes an unsettling picture of the fire having a deadly form and appearance. The word lance by
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The poem uses figurative language to help the reader understand the lover has already moved on from the love the speaker and lover shared together. The interesting thing about the poem is that figurative language is used mostly in the last two lines of the poem: “But in your day this moment is the sun, / Upon a hill, after the sun has set.”(11-12). In line 11, the speaker is mentioning the perspective of the lover when she was in relationship with the speaker in the past. The poet uses the phrase, “ This moment is the sun” to explain that the lovers experience of the relationship was like the sun; as if he is saying what that the sun represents the love between the speaker and the lover. In line 12, we see that the “sun has set”. This would signify that the love both the speaker and the lover had was over. This also suggests that the lover has moved on from their love. We can see that the use of the metaphor has shown us that the lover has moved on from the love shared together with speaker. The metaphor in lines 11 and 12 is told in the perspective of the lover that has moved on from the “sun” representing the love the speaker and lover