Millay’s speaker is caught between knowing better and wanting anyway. She has already learned that the person she longs for is empty—“just one other mound / Of sand, whereon no green thing ever grew.” Yet the thought of him keeps returning like water in a dry landscape: dew, an oasis, cold water underground. That promise feels life-giving, but it is treacherous, because it leads her to hope again. She chases a “colored phantom,” full of self-reproach, sobbing, cursing, falling, and rising, only to reach out and find nothing real to hold. The mood is arid, exhausted, and bitter, but also achingly human: it captures the pull of desire that survives even after the mind has recognized it as illusion.
Unnamed Sonnets V — Summary
Once more into my arid days like dew, Like wind from an oasis, or the sound Of cold sweet water bubbling underground, A treacherous messenger, the thought of you Comes to destroy me; once more I renew Firm faith in your abundance, whom I found Long since to be but just one other mound Of sand, whereon no green thing ever grew. And once again, and wiser in no wise, I chase your colored phantom on the air, And sob and curse and fall and weep and rise And stumble pitifully on to where, Miserable and lost, with stinging eyes, Once more I clasp,--and there is nothing there.