Sonnet 29-Edna St. Vincent Millay-Analysis

Sonnet 29 is a sonnet written by Edna St. Vincent Millay. A sonnet including this particular one is a kind of poetry written about love. This particular sonnet shows us how we are blind in love and she also describes from a personal experience that love keeps decreasing. In this poem the speaker is the author herself who tells us from personal experience about love and shows it in a pessimistic light. One of the main themes of the poems is tormented love. The author may be speaking of her own lover or of her parents’ split up. In this poem she says that although love may start off very strong, eventually, over time, it keeps decreasing. The author did not have a very good childhood as at a very young age, her parents split up. Her mother inspired her to write a lot and it is possible that due to how she spent her childhood, moving from one relatives house to another and also all the heartbreaks she has faced, may have had an impact on her poetry. Later on in life, she was a rather controversial poet and also became a homosexual.   One of the other themes may be unrequited love which is shown as she shows through the sonnet how her lover no longer loves her but shows that she still has feelings for her lover.
In the first part of the octave, we see that Edna St. Vincent Millay describes things passing away or as some may say going down and ending. She says that the light goes away when the sun sets and the day passes by and is no longer there. She also mentions the year’s passing as one of the things. In the second quatrain, she speaks of the diminishing of the moon and the fading tides. Now in the later part of this quatrain, she does not talk about the things in nature that diminish in time but she now speaks of a man’s love for her that also reduces with time just as the sun goes down at the end of the day. In the sestet, she writes about how she always knew that the man’s love for her will reduce however, even after knowing this, she falls in love carelessly...