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WORKSHOPS » POETRY » EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, "[I, BEING BORN A WOMAN AND DISTRESSED]" » RE-READING
Edna St. Vincent Millay, "[I, being born a woman and distressed]"
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Re-Reading Questions
Text on p. 879 of the full Ninth Edition
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I, being born a woman and distressed [1]
By all the needs and notions of my kind, [2]
Am urged by your propinquity to find [3]
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest [4]
To bear your body's weight upon my breast: [5]
So subtly is the fume of life designed, [6]
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind, [7]
And leave me once again undone, possessed. [8]
Think not for this, however, the poor treason [9]
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain, [10]
I shall remember you with love, or season [11]
My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain: [12]
I find this frenzy insufficient reason [13]
For conversation when we meet again.
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Re-Reading Questions
Note: Some of these questions require extensive answers to explore them fully. Therefore, you may either use them as brief prompts for your own thinking about the poem after reading the study materials or explore them in a paper.
1. Consider the questions in the pop-up notes. Are there others that you would ask? Which words show that Millay is talking about sexual desire (though she never says so directly)?
2. Millay was a strong feminist as well as an ambitious young poet at this time. What internal conflicts about her identity does this poem dramatize? What gender roles is she responding to? The poem has been characterized as an internalized erotic contest in which the "you" barely exists; consider this idea.
3. Look carefully at the form of the poem. It is a Petrarchan, or Italian, sonnet, with an octave and a sestet, a poem traditionally written by a man to a woman about his hopes and pains. Find the alliteration and mark the meter; does it give a sense of lyrical melody? Look again at the images in lines 6–7 and 9–10. How do these formal characteristics work with the modern tone and content of the poem?
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