Regret and Loneliness in “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed”

In the poem “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, there is a theme of loneliness and regret. The speaker is a woman looking back with melancholy reflection to the days of her youth when her life was full of hope and the promise of love. She remembers she once had lovers but she cannot recall them individually. Now she is alone left with only regret: for the unremembered faces of her past, for the passing of her youth, and for the loneliness of her life now. The speaker regrets her inability to remember “What lips [her] lips have kissed” (Line 1). No special man or moment comes to her mind. Her memories of her former glory days haunt her. Although she cannot recall any of her lovers in particular, she hears them as she listens to the rain; unclear faces in her mind like “ghosts…that tap and sigh / Upon the glass” (ll. 3-4). Her heart aches for the “unremembered lads” that had once shared her bed. (l.7). She regrets her youth is now behind her. She compares herself to the seasons with her youth as “summer” (l.13) which is warm and green. Now she is in the time of “winter” (l.9), stark, bleak, and dreary. Those days when she was young and carefree she thought would last forever; but looking back, they seemed to have lasted only “a little while”(14). The speaker is alone: “In winter stands the lonely tree” (l.9). She cannot remember “What loves have come and gone” (l.12). She did not find that one special person to share her life with and all the “birds have vanished one by one” (l.10). She once had many lovers: “what arms have lain / Under my head till morning” (ll.2-3); but now she is lonely and sad that never again will she have someone “turn to [her] at midnight” (l.8). In Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” the speaker looks back to the best part of her life, when she was young and pursued by men. She is left with only memories in her old age. Her words are tinged with regret and loneliness. There was no special love in her life, no one man she shared her bed with; she only remembers “that summer sang in me / A little while, that in me sings no more” (ll. 13-14).

Work Cited Millay, Edna St. Vincent. “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed.” Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. Ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. 7th edition. Boston: Wadsworth, 2010. 660.