What lips my lips have kissed
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “What lips my lips have kissed” was first published in the November 1920 issue of Vanity Fair. It is the 19th in a sequence of 22 sonnets, and was later republished in Millay’s 1923 collection “The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems”.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on 22 February 1892 in Rockland, Maine, US, and she died on 19 October 1950 in Austerlitz, New York, US, at the age of 58.Poet and playwright, Millay was a renowned social figure and noted feminist in New York City during the Roaring Twenties and beyond. She wrote much of her prose and verse under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd. Winning the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her poem “Ballad of the Harp-Weaver”, she was the first woman and second person to win the award. Highly regarded in her lifetime, she was described by critic Edmund Wilson as “one of the only poets writing in English in our time who have attained to anything like the stature of great literary figures”.
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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.