XLI
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear you body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clairfy the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain:
I find ths frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
this poem is about a woman in need of lust. who at that moment is not thinking with her brain but so to say with her “private part”. This is a one night stand led by lust.
This isn’t sonnets from an ungrafted tree- that is a rather long piece about a woman and her husband, this poem is one of the unnamed sonnets so the title usually reads ‘I being born a woman and distressed.’ It is however from the same book as Ungrafted Tree- Harp Weaver.
Edna St Vincent Millay was a bisexual. This poem in particular was written about her love for a woman.
I like this poem, because it makes the reader ask if she is talking to a woman or a man, it is really touchy, is her heart broken by a woman or man?