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What Lips My Lips Have Kissed Essay

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Beauty consistently deteriorates over time; women attempt to conceal this truth with makeup, skin products, and plastic surgeries. Even men nowadays dye their grey hair to extend their youthful appearance. In Edna St. Vincent Millay's, "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, " an older woman struggles to accept this harsh truth of aging, reflecting on her conquests of sex. Explicating her regret of unconnected, physical pleasure, a w oman desires a deeper and a more moving relationship by describing her emotional stance to her past loves and to her present.
The forgettable quality of her conquests details the woman’s impersonal relationship to them and underlines her current emotional emptiness and loneliness without her …show more content…

The first line introd uces a "lonely tree" which explicitly explains the immense loneliness that the old woman suffers (9). The transitional birds represent her passing lovers and emphasize the previous metaphor describing herself as the tree. Since the birds "vanished one by o ne," her lovers could not form long
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lasting relationships with the tree because they never stayed, and since she is a tree, she could not chase after the birds, being stuck implanted in the ground only hoping for a bird that may never come. In fact, her br anches have been receiving less and less birds every day "more silent than before" reiterating her previous grievance in line seven and eight that men do not desire to be on her tree as much as they used to. The final three lines provide an excellent summa tion of her deprived emotions. The speaker repeats her initial absentmindedness of former lovers to finalize its importance (12). The clear contrast of the summer in the past to her current winter in line 9 presents the seasonal transformation of
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