What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Quick answer: What Lips My Lips Have Kissed by Edna St. Vincent Millay analysed: the winter tree metaphor, the sonnet's frank speaker, and techniques worth stealing.
When this sonnet appeared in 1923, its premise was quietly revolutionary: a woman speaker with so many past lovers she has lost count, and no apology anywhere in the fourteen lines. Millay, who won the Pulitzer that same year, took the sonnet, the form men had used for centuries to catalogue women, and used it to survey her own romantic history with cool, elegiac frankness.
Yet the poem is not a boast. It is about forgetting, and about the strange grief of having been loved more than you can remember. Its emotional weather is November, not spring.
What the poem says
The octave admits the amnesia. What lips she has kissed, and where, and why, she has forgotten; whose arms lay under her head till morning, she cannot say. But tonight the rain is full of ghosts that tap and sigh at the window, waiting for a reply, and a quiet pain stirs for the 'unremembered lads' who will never turn to her again at midnight.
The sestet delivers the metaphor that reorganises everything. She is like a lonely tree in winter that cannot recall which birds have vanished one by one from its branches, only that its boughs are more silent than before. She cannot name the loves that have come and gone; she knows only that summer sang in her once, 'a little while', and sings no more.
How it works
The form is a strict Petrarchan sonnet, ABBA ABBA CDEDCE, and Millay uses the octave-sestet divide as a change of mode: the octave is literal, a woman at a rainy window; the sestet is one extended simile, held without interruption for six lines. Committing to a single image for an entire sestet is harder than it looks, and the poem's fame rests on that commitment.
The sensory logic is exact. Ghosts arrive as sounds, tapping rain, a sigh, and the tree's tragedy is also sound: not the absence of birds but the greater silence of the boughs. Loss is rendered as diminishing audio throughout, which gives the poem an eerie coherence most readers feel without noticing.
Why it lasts
The sonnet endures partly for what it did: it normalised a woman's sexual past as material for high lyric art, without defiance or confession, just weather. That shrugging dignity was new in 1923 and still reads as modern.
But its deeper survival is the universality under the scandal. Everyone's memory blurs; everyone becomes the winter tree eventually, aware of silence where there used to be singing. Millay found the image large enough to hold both a specific bohemian life and a general human fate, and that doubleness is what anthologies preserve.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the sustained sestet simile. Spend your first eight lines in the literal world, then give the last six entirely to one comparison and do not break it. The discipline forces you to find an image with enough rooms in it.
Steal the sound-map too: pick one sense and let every image of loss in the poem register through it. And steal the tone, elegy without apology, especially when writing about a past someone might expect you to regret.
What poets can take from this
- Write about forgetting rather than remembering; blurred memory is an underused subject.
- Hold one simile for a full sestet without switching images.
- Let a single sense (sound here) carry every instance of loss in the poem.
- Refuse apology in tone even when the material invites it.
- Use weather as the poem's emotional register instead of naming feelings.
Try it yourself
Write a sonnet whose octave describes a night when the weather brings back unnamed people from your past, and whose sestet is one uninterrupted simile comparing you to something in its off-season.
Questions
What is What Lips My Lips Have Kissed about?
A speaker acknowledges she has forgotten most of her past lovers, feeling their presence only as ghosts in the rain. In the sestet she compares herself to a winter tree that cannot recall its vanished birds, only its own new silence.
What form is the poem written in?
A Petrarchan sonnet in iambic pentameter (ABBA ABBA CDEDCE). The octave is a literal night scene; the sestet is a single extended simile of the lonely tree in winter.
Why was this sonnet significant in 1923?
It presented a woman's numerous love affairs without shame or confession, reversing the sonnet tradition in which women were the objects rather than the speakers. Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry the same year.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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