Sonnet 29, Edna St Vincent Millay
Sonnet 29 is a classical English or Shakespearean sonnet, which consists of 14 lines and a rhyming couplet. This mournful poem is about an old woman who discovers and admits that her lover doesn´t love her any more. She experiments different feelings through the poem: sadness, anger, pride, devastation, reasonableness, and disappointment.
The poet describes the sad feelings of the woman by repeating the phrase “pity me not” creating a rhythm and emphasizing the disappointment she wants to hide, showing her pride and arrogance, as she is getting old. This repetition also makes you slow down the reading speed, making you feel her depression and lowering the tone. We noticed that this old woman wants to hide her feelings, she is proud and doesn´t want others to feel sorry for her. She describes her them by using metaphors and creating images. “Pity me not because the light of the day at close of day no longer walks the sky;” in this metaphor, for example, she is telling us that the sun is setting, she´s declining. Throughout the first 6 lines she also says that her beauty is gone, she recognizes that she is losing her attraction by getting older. “Pity me not for beauties passed away, from field to ticket as the year goes by…” In the following metaphor the female says that she went from a green field to and old and dry up thicket, from young to old. She also refers to the energy of the sea ebbing away; she is losing vitality, energy and beauty. Finally we can find a metaphor referring to the waning moon, getting smaller, like her will to live. The tone is mournful, slow and depressive with long sounds “waning of the moon”. By using these very descriptive metaphors the poets creates images, making us feel and understand better the woman and how she truly is inside.
In the next two lines the poet breaks the structure using “Nor that” telling us the true problem, getting to the central part of her thoughts, soul and hard. This true...