Sam Casselle Sanchez

English 123

James Wilson

May 22,2018
Poem Analysis on [Women have loved before as I love now]

In the poem [Women have loved before as I love now], Edna St. Vincent Millay shows

how women aren’t always the same when it comes to loving. She explains how there are

women who would ignore men to escape from their lustful desire. However, there are women

who would try to seek love no matter who the person is. Millay shows the differences between

how people loved now, compared to how they love during the ancient times, which lonely

women would do anything and everything just to be loved.

The poem mixes with mythological events and ancient times to use it as a support for

her statement. In the 3rd stanza, she writes “Of Irish waters by a cornish prow” (3) according to

Marlene Montgomery, this refers to a superhuman female in Irish Mythology named Cliodhna,

“who lures young men away for sexual purposes”(Montgomery) and this made sense because

“prow” means the nose of the ship which splits the water in half. With that being said, Millay is

trying to say that some women would pass through men who is trying to be sexual with them.

However Millay also mentioned that women could also be into men with sexual desire which she

writes “Or Trojan waters by a spartan mast”(4) which Montgomery refers to Helen who had

fallen in love with a Trojan man and would leave her child and husband at home just to be with

the soldier. Although Millay states that the characteristics of love stays the same, she did not

guarantee that it would be for everyone because some women does not bear the same desire

as other women.

However, that was just one part of Millay saying that love isn’t for everyone, but for those

who seeks love like Helen, Millay writes “Much to their cost invaded here and there, hunting the

amorous line, skimming the rest”(5-6) which means that they will find a way and carefully find
the person who also has the same aspiration as them no matter what it takes. She also

mentioned that she found someone who has the same characteristic as her saying “I find some

woman bearing as I bear / love like a burning city in the breast.”(lines 7-8) I don’t get what she

means by “love like a burning city in the breast, but it kind of sounds like something sexual

because of the word “breast” and how she describes “love” which symbolizes how they’re

making love(sex) and the “burning city” symbolizes the intensity or heat of their body colliding

which make sense because the poem is somehow sexual. It’s really hard to explain what Millay

meant when she said “I think however that of all alive / I only in such utter, ancient way”(9-10)

because the words aren’t usually written that way in this generation, but when I changed it to

modern prose I came up with “out of many people / I only feel complete in ancient way” which

came to a possibility that she only feels complete if she loves the way how ancients people

loved which is being a go getter and lustful. Everything made so much sense when Millay stated

the last three stanzas saying:

“The unregenerate passions of a day

when treacherous queens, with death upon the tread,

Heedless and wilful, took their knights to bed” (lines 12-14)

Meaning that howmuch ugly the situation is, if a lonely woman is really desperate to find love,

then she would do anything and everything just to be loved no matter who the person is.

It was really hard to understand the poem if the readers read it wrong, the meter of this

poem is trochaic pentameter because it has five feet and the it’s trochaic because each stanzas

have long stressed part of the word or syllables and followed by short unstressed syllables.

Reading it one by one helped me understand the meaning better because there are some parts

where you really have to tone it down and up just to understand how the speaker express her

feelings. “The sonnet” explains the rhyme scheme of some poem in the album is abab cdcd efef

gg saying “sonnet is divided into three units of four lines each (quatrains) and a final unit of two

lines (couplet), and sometimes the lines spacing reflects this division…. The scheme abab cdcd
efef gg is the classic one.”(The Sonnet, 667) just like [Women have loved before as I love now]

which has different rhyme pattern every stanzas that made this poem exciting to read and

easier to understand. This poem really relates to Millay because according to Amandas Ong,

Millay is a “party girl poet. A sexually adventurous bisexual. A morphine addict.“ which is why

this poem is really sexual because Millay had a background of being “sexually open’’ when she

was married. Her ideals to being feminist opened up her mind to write her poems.

Millay made a great statement about lonely women who would do anything just to be

loved because I feel as though that love like this is still happening in this generation. Knowing

her background really helps because you can see once you see a person’s personality, you’d

understand more of what they are trying to say. Also Using mythological events really helped

broaden the meaning because it gave us an idea on how ancient people seek love. The

meaning of [women have loved before as i love now] is really hard to figure out. However, it is

easier to understand it if you read it correctly with the use of meter and since we don’t really use

deep words these days, changing the sentence into modern prose can help a lot to understand

the meaning easier.

Work Cite:

Montgomery, Marlene. Normal Covers a Wide Range: The Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, 16

Nov. 1998. Accessed 22 May 2018.

Ong, Amandas. Edna St Vincent Millay's poetry has been eclipsed by her personal life – let's

change that, 22 Feb. 2018. Accessed 22 May 2018.

Miller, David. The Sonnet. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, Accessed 22 May 2018