Love is life and if you miss love, you miss life. The Petrarchan sonnet “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” by Edna St. Vincent Millay is a perfect example of a woman who has missed out on love. She has spent years with different men in her bed. She has been left heart broken and lonely. She will spend last years of her life cold and alone. She spent her life playing love games when instead she should have been searching for someone to spend the rest of her life with. This woman has spent years of her life, having different men lay with her through the night. Now after time has passed, she does not even remember who they were. They have all become a big blur in her life. She also has forgotten what it feels like to be loved, kissed, and held by her lovers. The amnesia suggests she could be a very old woman. Now with most of her life gone, she is to spend the rest of it all alone with no one but the rain that taps and sighs at her window.
In line six thru she says, “And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain for unremembered lads that not again will turn to me at midnight with a cry.”(Page 440 line 6-8) This shows that heart must be empty and broken. Now she has no one around to love her body or her soul. The men she can no longer remember will not be coming back to her.
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This is important because image if the seasons of the year were like life. Spring is the time of birth, summer the middle of being an adult, fall is the golden years, and winter is the time close to death. Now read the line again, “Thus in winter stands a lonely tree,” it makes more sense now to think she is the tree and is very old and alone. (Page 441 line 9) Now remember all of the birds have vanished. Meaning the men are gone. It could be thought that she spent her time with the mocking birds during the summer instead of finding a snow owl to spend time with during the