Lips Have Kissed

The Emptiness That Comes from Love

From the title of the poem “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, readers might get the feeling that this will be a romantic poem, one about true love and all the joys and pleasures that come from it. However, as you read, the message of the poem becomes quite explicit. Although the poem is about love, it talks about the consequences of “love”, or a love that was never truly real, love that leaves a person with regrets. In the poem “What Lips My Have Lips Have Kissed”, Edna St. Vincent Millay uses imagery, metaphors, and a gloomy tone to express the change she has gone through and the loss of her happiness.

The imagery in this poem is profound and powerful. It really

Throughout the poem, the speaker uses words like “forgotten” (2), “unremembered”, “pain” (6), “vanished” (10) etc.; these are all gloomy words and to some degree display sadness. For example, rather than the speaker using the word “gone” to describe the birds’ departure, she uses vanished. The word vanished puts more emphasis on the birds leaving. When something is described as vanishing, it gives the sense that whatever has vanished will not return. The birds vanishing means they will never return. Comparing the tree to the speaker, it indicates that her lovers will never return and perhaps that she will never be in another relationship. The word vanish goes beyond something that has disappeared. The speaker uses these words to fully capture how she feels. These are the words that are most likely to be remembered from the poem because they are powerful words. Without these words, the poem would not be as depressing as it is. It would be a poem about a person who had terrible past relationships. When you add these words, it goes beyond a past relationship. It is more about the effect of the past relationships and how they left the author feeling useless and sad. That is what the speaker wants to convey and that is why she used those