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Loves Of Youth

 

            In life we meet many people who touch our lives. Some of the people we meet pass in our memory as a leaf blowing across a field. Yet there are others who linger in our minds forever. In Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed and Where, and Why" there is an expression of sorrow for the loss of memory of those loves.
             In the beginning of "What Lips My Lips" she is talking of the love that is passed between two people. A kiss is a profound thing and waking up beside someone with your head on their arm is a feeling of comfort. But time has washed away part of that memory and in her older years they wander in her mind as her line "but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh" suggests. She feels pain that she will never see these lads again and that she does not remember them. .
             The ending of the poem gives a suggestion of war as in her line "Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before." In looking closer at the time she lived you see that she lived during World War I and II. This would have been a time of intense love for a short time period as "young lads" went off to war. She knows that for a short time there was a rich warmth in her life "I only know that summer sang in me" and now that it is gone.
             Edna St. Vincent Millay may or may not have been talking about loves lost in war, but she definitely speaks to today's society. The poem speaks of not remembering those that you have loved and who have loved you. That it is a terrible sorrow to not have someone special in your life of all the countless ones that you have loved.
            


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