Women have loved before as I love now

Edna St. Vincent Millay's Women have loved before as I love now

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet Women have loved before as I love now is a striking meditation on the timeless and consuming nature of love, framed through historical and mythological allusion. The poem interrogates the speaker’s emotional experience by situating it within a lineage of women who have loved fiercely, destructively, and without regard for consequence. Through its rich intertextuality, controlled intensity, and psychological depth, the poem transcends personal confession to become a broader commentary on passion, historicity, and feminine defiance. This essay will explore the poem’s historical and cultural context, its deft use of literary devices, its central themes, and its emotional resonance, while also considering Millay’s biographical influences and the philosophical implications of her argument.

Historical and Cultural Context

Millay, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet of the early 20th century, was renowned for her lyrical precision and her subversive engagement with themes of female autonomy, desire, and suffering. Writing during the aftermath of World War I and the early years of modern feminism, Millay often explored love not as a sentimental ideal but as a force of upheaval—both personal and societal. This sonnet, published in Fatal Interview (1931), a sequence chronicling an ill-fated love affair, reflects her fascination with the intersections of classical mythology, medieval romance, and contemporary female experience.

The poem’s references to “Irish waters by a Cornish prow” and “Trojan waters by a Spartan mast” immediately evoke legendary narratives of doomed passion. The first allusion likely invokes the tragic love story of Tristan and Iseult, a medieval tale in which the Cornish knight Tristan and the Irish princess Iseult engage in an adulterous affair that leads to ruin. The second allusion points to Helen of Sparta, whose elopement with Paris of Troy precipitated the Trojan War. Both myths center women whose desires disrupt political and social order, reinforcing Millay’s portrayal of love as an all-consuming, even catastrophic force.

By invoking these figures, Millay aligns her speaker with a tradition of women who, “much to their cost,” loved recklessly. The phrase “here and there, / Hunting the amorous line, skimming the rest” suggests a selective engagement with history—one that seeks out narratives of passion while disregarding more mundane records. This mirrors Millay’s own poetic project: she is not merely recounting history but excavating it for emotional truths that resonate across time.

Literary Devices and Structure

Though the poem adheres to the sonnet form, its power lies not in its rhyme scheme but in its masterful use of imagery, metaphor, and syntactic control. The central metaphor—Love like a burning city in the breast—is arresting in its visceral intensity. Unlike conventional depictions of love as a gentle flame or blooming flower, Millay’s imagery suggests destruction, chaos, and inescapable fervor. A “burning city” evokes both the literal sacking of Troy and the internal devastation of unchecked passion. The metaphor also implies a public spectacle; just as a city’s destruction is witnessed by many, the speaker’s love is not private suffering but a grand, almost mythic event.

The poem’s syntax reinforces its thematic tension between historical continuity and individual exceptionalism. The opening lines establish a connection between past and present (“Women have loved before as I love now”), but by the volta (the traditional turn in a sonnet’s argument), the speaker asserts her uniqueness:

I think however that of all alive
I only in such utter, ancient way
Do suffer love; in me alone survive
The unregenerate passions of a day

Here, Millay employs paradoxical language—ancient yet alive, unregenerate yet survive—to suggest that the speaker’s love is both archaic and singular. The word “unregenerate” is particularly loaded, implying a refusal to be tamed or modernized, a throwback to a more primal emotional state.

The closing couplet sharpens this assertion with its reference to “treacherous queens” who took their knights to bed “with death upon the tread.” The phrase suggests that these women acted knowing their actions would lead to ruin—their passion was inseparable from peril. The adjective “treacherous” is ambiguous: it may reflect societal condemnation of such women, but Millay’s tone suggests admiration for their audacity.

Themes: Love as Destructive Force and Feminine Defiance

At its core, the poem grapples with love as an annihilating force—one that has historically brought women to ruin, yet which the speaker embraces unabashedly. Unlike Petrarchan sonnets that idealize love or Shakespearean sonnets that often intellectualize it, Millay’s poem presents love as an existential trial, aligning it with the tragic heroines of myth.

A key theme is the tension between individuality and historical repetition. The speaker initially acknowledges that her experience is not new (“Women have loved before as I love now”), yet she insists on her singularity (“in me alone survive / The unregenerate passions”). This duality suggests that while love’s intensity may be a recurring phenomenon, the speaker’s personal experience of it feels unprecedented. There is a defiance here, a refusal to be diminished by precedent.

The poem also engages with gendered notions of passion. Historically, women who loved fiercely—Cleopatra, Iseult, Helen—were often vilified as destructive temptresses. Millay reclaims this narrative, portraying such love not as weakness but as a kind of ferocious authenticity. The speaker does not apologize for her emotions; instead, she aligns herself with queens who were “heedless and wilful,” suggesting that true passion requires defiance of social constraints.

Emotional and Philosophical Resonance

The poem’s emotional impact lies in its raw, almost confrontational honesty. The speaker does not merely describe love; she embodies it as a consuming fire, refusing to soften its edges. This resonates with Millay’s broader poetic ethos—one that rejects Victorian modesty in favor of unfiltered emotional expression.

Philosophically, the poem raises questions about the nature of passion and time. Is love an eternal recurrence, as the references to myth suggest? Or is each experience of it singular, as the speaker claims? Millay seems to argue for both: love is a recurring archetype, yet each lover feels it as uniquely their own. This paradox speaks to the human condition—our simultaneous connection to and isolation within our emotions.

Comparative and Biographical Insights

Millay’s own life—marked by numerous love affairs and a fiercely independent spirit—inflects the poem with autobiographical resonance. Known for her bohemian lifestyle and refusal to conform to traditional gender roles, Millay often wrote about love as a site of both ecstasy and suffering. Fatal Interview, the collection in which this sonnet appears, was inspired by her own tumultuous affair with the poet George Dillon. Thus, the poem can be read as both a personal testament and a universal meditation.

Comparatively, the poem recalls the work of Sappho, another poet who depicted love as an overwhelming, almost physical force. It also invites contrast with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, which idealizes love as redemptive. Millay, by contrast, presents love as a force that destroys as much as it exalts.

Conclusion

Women have loved before as I love now is a sonnet of remarkable depth and intensity, weaving together myth, history, and personal emotion to explore love’s destructive grandeur. Through its vivid metaphors, historical allusions, and defiant tone, the poem positions the speaker within a lineage of passionate women while asserting the unparalleled nature of her own experience. Millay does not merely describe love—she ignites it on the page, allowing the reader to feel its heat and its peril. In doing so, she crafts a work that is both timeless and urgently immediate, a testament to the enduring power of poetry to capture the most ungovernable of human emotions.

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