Time

I came across Edna St Vincent Millay's powerful and moving sonnet about loss in a collection I was looking through the other day.  I think it was first published in 1931.  Millay, active as a poet in the first half of the Twentieth Century and winner of the Pullitzer Prize for poetry in 1923, was a particularly fine composer of sonnets. It's not a style I've tried, but perhaps I will.

"Time" isn't an easy read, I suppose. The first two lines make that clear enough:

'Time does not bring relief; you all have lied

who told me time would ease me of my pain . . .'

It speaks very clearly to the human experience of loss, the yearning for what has been, and even for what never had the opportunity to be: the shunning of those places that carry reminders so as to avoid the pain, and, conversely, when thankfully coming to a place that holds no reminder:

'I say, "There is no memory of him here!"

and so stand stricken, so remembering him.'

When such deep thoughts are placed and expressed within the strict literary limits imposed by the sonnet form, they grow in intensity and gain new power, I think. The writer's pain is accurately defined and transmitted, in a way that - for me, anyway - cannot but connect with and expose my own sense of loss.