Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnets 2” reads like a rebuttal delivered from the middle of grief. Published in *Renascence and Other Poems* in 1917, when Millay was twenty-five, it comes from a poet making traditional forms speak with a new, unsentimental voice. Millay would later become the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and this early sonnet shows why: it takes a familiar consolation—time heals—and refuses it with such force that the refusal becomes the poem’s real subject.
At its center is a double grief: the loss of the beloved and the failure of the promised cure. The speaker does not say time heals slowly; she says time brings no relief at all. What she misses is not abstract; it arrives through the senses. Rain becomes “the weeping of the rain,” tide becomes “the shrinking of the tide,” and spring’s thaw—“old snows melt from every mountain-side”—only points out what will not melt in her. The line “last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane” suggests that the past is being burned away from the landscape, but the next line insists that “last year’s bitter loving must remain / Heaped on my heart.” The word “heaped” turns memory into a physical weight, an accumulation that refuses to be cleared.
The poem uses the Petrarchan sonnet to stage this tension. Its first eight lines rhyme ABBAABBA, creating a tightly enclosed space, almost like a room the speaker cannot leave. The iambic pentameter gives the argument a controlled pulse, but Millay breaks against it with abrupt pauses and enjambment. The very first line stops hard in the middle: “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied.” That semicolon is a wall; the accusation follows in the same breath. In the octave, the rhyme of “pain” with “rain” and “lane” with “remain” keeps returning the speaker to the same sound, just as grief returns her to the same thought.
The turn comes at line 9, shifting from time to place. The speaker confesses that there are “a hundred places where I fear / To go” because they “brim” with his memory. The verb is chosen with care: a place does not merely contain memory; it is filled to the point of overflow. Seeking escape, she enters “some quiet place / Where never fell his foot or shone his face.” The consecutive rhymes “place” and “face” feel neat and sealed, as though she has found a clean space. But the poem’s last two lines undo that neatness. She says, “There is no memory of him here!”—and the exclamation itself invokes him. The closing line, “And so stand stricken, so remembering him!” shows that absence recalls him more powerfully than presence could. The rhyme of “here” with “fear” and “him” with “brim” ties the beloved’s name to the very overflowing she hoped to escape.
Millay’s speaker is not quietly patient; she is angry, accusing, and almost physical in her grief. That voice mattered in 1917 and still matters now. The poem refuses the polite narrative that mourning moves in a straight line toward healing. Instead it argues that memory has its own geography and seasons. A place with no trace of him becomes the loudest reminder because the speaker must say his absence aloud, and in doing so she recreates him. “Stricken” is the key word: memory strikes like a blow, sudden and bodily. The final repetition—“remembering him” after “no memory of him”—leaves the poem not resolved but echoing. Time does not bring relief, and the sonnet, for all its formal control, keeps the wound open.