Random response

I like Edna St. Vincent Millay...I liked her sonnets I think because they were sort of depressing, but in a powerful realistic sad kind of way. I liked Marvell too though, and he wasn't so depressing. I think I liked his intensity. What she, Millay, wrote about, you could tell it meant a lot to her. She was quite serious in her sorrow, no sarcasm, so you'd think they would be on the dull side but they weren't. They were just real pain. She reminisces in one of them, about happier times, but you know that she is still weighed down by this aching sorrow, which is also evident in the second sonnet. She says, "Women have loved before as I love now/.../I think, however, that of all alive/I only in such utter, ancient way/Do suffer love". I remembered it because she says she doesn't enjoy love; through her heartache she only suffers it, a suffering greater than any suffering any women before her could have felt. Bold, Millay, bold. But that makes it more stunning when you think about what she's actually saying.

This is what I would consider a classic sonnet: iambic pentameter (almost entirely throughout) and written in the early 20th century. I know, it's not Shakespeare or Donne, but it's a sonnet I'd put in with the older poets. It's not like modern sonnets, because it still has much of the ancient form to it. I think maybe that's why I like it, another reason perhaps, because I know it was written in a different time period, but a heartbreak is a heartbreak, no matter how much time might pass.