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Summary Of Read History By Edna St. Vincent Millay Analysis

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Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet, “Read History,” describes how society’s advancements and their new ideas impacts the changes that the people make in the world negatively and how they should start to find solutions to the world’s problems. Millay makes comparison through lines five and six, “Our engines plunge into the seas, they climb / Above our atmosphere: We grow not more,” connoting how society’s advancements continue to thrive, however, doesn’t benefit the people within the society. In the first stanza, Millay uses formal diction and comparisons to interpret her views on society: “Read history: so learn your place in Time / And go to sleep: all this was done before.” (1-2) In these two lines, she indicates to the reader on how history …show more content…

These lines suggest that society glimpses over finding the root of their problems and describes how they don’t to explore other solutions to fix their problems. They rather figure out how to solve it quickly and then move onto the other problems that they have. Next, she uses parallelism to compare society’s advancements to “engines plunging into seas” (5) in order to describe how societies advancements don’t benefit people and in reality impact them negatively. However, the advancements continues to grow because people demand more from the world to meet their needs. Millay uses this to make her point about how society continues to plummet as they make more negative changes to the world and how their advancements will not be beneficial anymore because people will slowly stop needing them as time goes on. Then, Millay uses metaphors to express how the world is impacted negatively by society’s advancements, “Above our atmosphere: We grow not more / Profound as we approach the oceans floor / Our flight is lofty, it is not sublime.” (6-7) These lines portray how the world’s changes makes people rely on their advancements too much. She describes how people are too dependent on their world’s advancements and how they are impacted negatively. However,

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