ipl-logo

What Lips My Lips Have Kissed Essay

798 Words4 Pages

Beauty consistently deteriorates over time; women attempt to conceal this truth with makeup, skin products, and plastic surgeries. Even men nowadays dye their grey hair to extend their youthful appearance. In Edna St. Vincent Millay's, "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, " an older woman struggles to accept this harsh truth of aging, reflecting on her conquests of sex. Explicating her regret of unconnected, physical pleasure, a w oman desires a deeper and a more moving relationship by describing her emotional stance to her past loves and to her present.
The forgettable quality of her conquests details the woman’s impersonal relationship to them and underlines her current emotional emptiness and loneliness without her …show more content…

The first line introd uces a "lonely tree" which explicitly explains the immense loneliness that the old woman suffers (9). The transitional birds represent her passing lovers and emphasize the previous metaphor describing herself as the tree. Since the birds "vanished one by o ne," her lovers could not form long
-
lasting relationships with the tree because they never stayed, and since she is a tree, she could not chase after the birds, being stuck implanted in the ground only hoping for a bird that may never come. In fact, her br anches have been receiving less and less birds every day "more silent than before" reiterating her previous grievance in line seven and eight that men do not desire to be on her tree as much as they used to. The final three lines provide an excellent summa tion of her deprived emotions. The speaker repeats her initial absentmindedness of former lovers to finalize its importance (12). The clear contrast of the summer in the past to her current winter in line 9 presents the seasonal transformation of
Leonik

Show More
Related

  • The Awakening Bird Analysis

    967 Words  | 4 Pages

    Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening opens with a scene of two birds, emphasizing that the motif of birds later within the novel will play an important part with setting the constant metaphor they bring. Throughout the whole novel the motif of birds is a metaphor for the Victorian women during that period -- caged birds serve as reminders of Edna’s entrapment and the entrapment of Victorian women in general. Edna makes many attempts to escape her cage (husband, children, and society), but her efforts only take her into other cages, such as the pigeon house. Edna views this new home as a sign of her independence, but the pigeon house represents her inability to remove herself from her former life, due to the move being just “two steps away” (122).

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Frrancine Cournos's 'City Of One: A Memoir'

    1985 Words  | 8 Pages

    Throughout the City of One Cournos clearly illustrates how her history of having her attachment figures disappear or seemingly abandoned her made future relationships difficult. In rich and painful description Cournos describes the emotional walls she had built around herself and the anxiety she faced in new relationships. For instance, she describes the detachment and numbness she felt during her first marriage that ended in divorce which is summed up in the following quote, “By the time medical school ended we’d agreed to call it quits. I guess I should have married a man instead of a role, but I was too detached to know the difference” (Counous, 2006, p. 165). When she married her second husband, which turned into a healthy relationship, she describes her intense intermixing of both happiness but also fears.

    Read More

  • Scansion And Analysis Of Robert Frost's 'Range Finding'

    763 Words  | 4 Pages

    Part I: Scansion and Analysis This analysis is going to be over Robert Frost’s poem “Range Finding” divided into two stanzas symbolizing the effects of war through the comparison of nature. The rhyme scheme is (abbaabba ccdeed) ultimately giving the poem a smooth and calming flow. This rhyme scheme indicates that the poem is a Petrarchan sonnet also known as an Italian sonnet. Although the poem does have a rhyme scheme, it doesn’t have any type of meter to the way it read.

    Read More

  • Birdie Character Analysis

    1211 Words  | 5 Pages

    Birdie is not an easy read, an unexpected fact, considering the woman who penned it, Tracey Lindberg, is a lawyer and professor by trade. The difficulty in reading the novel comes not only from its harrowing subject matter but also from the way the story is told. It’s non-linear and jumps back and forth from the present to the past. At the start of each chapter are poems, which often transform characters into animals, such as Bernice Meetos/Birdie who longs to return to the tree, Pimatisewin. The story doesn’t entirely belong to Bernice however, as the chapters tell the story of Beatrice from the voice of five different women- her cousin, aunt, mother, landlord and herself.

    Read More

  • Crystal Stars Have Begun To Shine Poem Analysis

    708 Words  | 3 Pages

    Can people be fully mature? Many teeangers and adults think they are mature and can control many things. Here are two literary works that show how people are not fully mature as they thought. A short story “Crystal Stars Have Begun to Shine” by Martha Brooks and a poem “12 years old” by Kim Stockwood deal with the maturity of people.

    Read More

  • Symbolism In Catherine Called Birdy

    631 Words  | 3 Pages

    Catherine relates to her birds as she keeps her birds in cages and she feels as if she is being trapped in her position as a noble women who is to be married off and do the duties a women should do. The contrast in her perspective at the end of the novel, which is when

    Read More

  • Paul Laurence Dunbar Sympathy Themes

    914 Words  | 4 Pages

    The oppression is binding the bird to its cage while the bird hopes and prays that someone will hear him so that he can leave this maiming tyranny. In addition in “Caged Bird” the bird is singing with mighty voice that was conceived by the rage that the bird felt toward the oppression that was trapping it. The tune that the bird sings is described as, “The caged bird sings,/ with a fearful trill,/ of things unknown”(Angelou, 30-32). The bird is illustrating the anger that it felt, by fighting the tyranny that he is facing. The tyranny is holding him down and the rage that the bird feels from this pain is what the bird symbolizes.

    Read More

  • Birds And Other Things We Placed In Our Hearts By Timmy Reed

    1259 Words  | 6 Pages

    This leaves the reader under the impression that the birds are symbols of love because the author writes, “[We used] birds to stimulate [our] hearts” (Reed). Their hearts were disappearing and to gain back what they were about to lose they used birds to fill that void. However, the author decides to make a quick turn and establishes that the use of birds is no longer needed. They decided to let their birds fly into the sun, and they

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis Of Daddy, By Sylvia Plath

    838 Words  | 4 Pages

    She addresses her father as “daddy” like a little kid, speaks in a child-like abrupt manner, and begins the poem with “you do not do/you do not do/ anymore black shoe,” lines that resemble the old nursery rhyme “There is an old woman who lived in a shoe”. However, this is not a happy child, but one with frustration and unresolved conflicts with her father, as she calls him “evil” and a “bastard”. Furthermore, the way an adult woman completely turns into her childhood self suggests an obsession and a fixation within the past, a phenomenon commonly associated with psychological deficiencies stemming from unsolved childhood issues. These observations correspond to how the speaker metaphorically refers to her father as a “black shoe” that she had to live in, showing her inability to overcome the shadow of her late father. Thus, by addressing him directly instead of referring to him in the past tense, the speaker confronts her obsession and tries to escape the

    Read More

  • A Worn Path By Eudora Welty: An Analysis

    887 Words  | 4 Pages

    Our culture values youth and strength over the wisdom of the elderly. However, in Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path,” the reader gets a taste of how although youth vanishes, wisdom does not. In the story, an elderly woman named Phoenix travels the long journey to get medicine for her grandson, who died several years before the story begins. Her mind is failing, and when she meets other travelers as well as obstacles along the way, she stops to make conversation, even when the “traveler” turns out to be a scarecrow. She clearly made the journey many times before, as often her instinct is the only thing guiding her.

    Read More

  • The Power Of Perception In Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven

    1490 Words  | 6 Pages

    While the perception of the reader remains the same, the narrator’s perception of the bird becomes more jumbled and insane when he starts asking questions like “is there balm in Gilead? (line 89)”. His troubled mind seeks for relief from the bird . Also he is asks if there is a balm that can heal anything, and if he will ever be able to embrace Lenore again. When relief of grief doesn’t come the image of the bird changes to a prophet possibly sent from the devil.

    Read More

  • Loneliness In Susan Glaspell's A Jury Of Her Peers

    874 Words  | 4 Pages

    The bird is Mrs. Wright. It was locked up in a cage as was Mrs. Wright when her husband was alive. He wasn’t a very “cheerful” man, therefore, people didn’t come to visit them. Over the twenty year time period of their marriage she became lonely, which resulted in her buying a bird and the drastic change in personality. The broken door to the cage represents Mrs. Wright’s freedom from her husband.

    Read More

  • Cather Love Queer History Essay

    917 Words  | 4 Pages

    But, “contemporary queer subjects” can better relate to Vivien because they are seeking other lonely individuals like themselves in the past (36). Vivien sought out someone like her by translating Sappho’s lyrics and interrupting it in a different way. However, the concept of remembering someone remained

    Read More

  • The Symbolism Of Absence In Ann Beattie's Snow

    542 Words  | 3 Pages

    Being away from a person or place for a period of time causes differing underlining emotions in a person, whether the feelings are good or bad. Absence, sometimes, creates a sense of loneliness, regretfulness, or longing for the past. Ann Beattie’s short story, “Snow” reveals the emotions of the narrator as she reminisces on her past life. A central theme of absence is prevalent throughout the short story, which is conveyed to the readers through the use of symbolism.

    Read More

  • Caged Bird Analysis Essay

    700 Words  | 3 Pages

    Lines one through seven define the free bird as one that “floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wing in the orange sun rays” (Angelou) this is a representation of freedom and joy. The second and third stanza lines, eight through fourteen defines the caged bird that “stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage” (Angelou) where these words reference isolation and despair compared to the freedom in stanza one. These lines create a visual response of the bird’s environments. The third stanza is repeated at the end of the poem for prominence as it reflects the two birds are so different.

    Read More

More about What Lips My Lips Have Kissed Essay

Open Document