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Edna St. Vincent Millay

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Edna St. Vincent Millay, in the sonnet, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,” invokes a time when she was full of youth, but now that time has passed she has realized how many lovers she had forgotten. The first device used is imagery, “the rain/Is full of ghost tonight,that tap and sigh,” in which we can picture ghosts of her past lovers around her; the second device that’s used is the metaphor, “the lonely tree,/Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,” meaning that the tree is the woman and the birds are the men; the rhyme scheme is ABBA in the first stanza such as, “lain,” “rain,” and “why,” “sigh”. In the beginning of the sonnet she was thinking of her lovers that have come and gone, but then at line 12, “thus,” it

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