What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
One of the great pleasures in re-reading Millay’s sonnet “What Lips My Lips
Have Kissed, and Where, and Why” is encountering its complexity again.
Millay chose one of the oldest and most venerated of literary forms—think
of Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—in which to declare her
independence from gender roles and general decorum that she found
so stifling. In so doing, she extended the range of the sonnet while
challenging some of its basic assumptions.
It is important to remember Millay in her own era. This sonnet was
published in 1922 and later included in The Harp Weaver, for which she
received the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922),
Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium (1923), and
Pound’s Cantos (begun in 1924) were already winning the day for Modernism,
and poems such as Hart Crane’s “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” (1926)
posed the unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, question of how one
deals with memory, with sentimentality, with aspects that make us human.
